UCD Architecture Yearbook 2011

UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2011

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EDITORS

Marcus Donaghy

Deirdre McKenna

UCD Architecture

University College Dublin Richview, Clonskeagh Dublin 14, Ireland Tel: +353 1 7162757 www.ucd.ie/architecture

UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2011 STRATEGIES FOR AN URBAN SOCIETY

(front cover) Sketch detail David Lilburn

UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2011 STRATEGIES FOR AN URBAN SOCIETY

This yearbook was published by UCD Architecture on the occasion of the end of year show 2010–11 on 27th May 2011.

Copyright the editors, students, authors, photographers and UCD Architecture.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise, without first seeking the written permission of the copyright owners and of the publishers.

EDITORS

Marcus Donaghy Deirdre McKenna DESIGN

Conor & David Printed in Ireland by Hudson Killeen

ISBN 978-1-905254-57-6

UCD Architecture University College Dublin Richview, Clonskeagh Dublin 14, Ireland Tel: +353 1 7162757 www.ucd.ie/architecture

UCD ARCHITECTURE YE ARBOOK 2011

Introduction Marcus Donaghy & Deirdre McKenna May 2011

This yearbook is an exercise in drawing together some strands of investigation, thought, engagement and creative endeavour, that are concentrated in and reaching out from UCD School of Architecture. Material gathered includes essays; abstracts; records of events and projects, interleaved and bound in one place.

The studios this year attend to the theme of ‘Strategies for an Urban Society’, and the work of these studios is nourished and challenged by the concurrent, eddying and sometimes convergent research activities of part-time and full-time staff: academic, practicing and visiting. The intention is to celebrate this diversity and by binding the work together to illuminate some coincident and overlapping concerns.

The question of what might be urban is not definitively stated, instead it is hoped that by triangulating and reading between the lines and content of this issue some Strategies for an Urban Society are suggested through the concrete contexts we understand as urban. These places range from townland to fairgreen; village or city; school and library; campus, square, room and mind.

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UCD ARCHITECTURE YE ARBOOK 2011

5 SENSA –TION

Laura O’Brien and Nicky Rackard Photo by Alice Clancy

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Headspace Architecture, Consciousness and the Depiction of the Interior 7th March 2011 Hugh Campbell

This lecture is overdue. It has already been two and a half years since I took up the role of Professor of Architecture. And in that time a lot has happened.

My appointment in September 2008 more or less coincided with the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

The two events were, as far as I can ascertain, unconnected. However, as we know from Brian Cowen and Bertie Ahern, Lehmans’ collapse was pretty much the sole cause of all the economic and social woes this country has suffered since.

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On so many levels, it might be said that this period has been one of drastic contraction – contraction of capital, of construction activity, of wealth but contraction also of opportunity, of ambition, of hope. However – and without wanting to gloss over the financial challenges facing the university sector – from the point of view of UCD Architecture (the view from where I’m sitting) things have seemed in so many ways to be expanding. Partly by deliberate design, partly through happy circumstance, the school (as it is to be again) has begun to make connections, form alliances, extend its scope and broaden its horizons. Thinking about this, I am reminded of Rosalind Krauss’s famous essay on Sculpture in the Expanded Field. Our task for the coming years it seems to me, is to think about Architecture in the Expanded Field.

UCD ARCHITECTURE YE ARBOOK 2011

One might be forgiven for thinking, that an inaugural lecture would be the perfect occasion to explore that larger hinterland of architecture – its expanded realm and the challenges and opportunities it offers. But, somewhat perversely, I am proposing this evening to do almost the opposite. Instead of looking outwards, I want to look inwards. Instead of thinking on the large scale, I want to consider the most intimate scale of all. I want to look at the space inside our heads, and to consider what it has to do with how we design and experience buildings.

My rationale for this is that the inaugural lecture is most often described as an occasion to present and make sense of the research and enquiry one has been engaged with to date. It is as much about looking backwards as forwards. It offers a chance to revisit what might have seemed at times like individual essays and singular endeavours, and to find between them a common thread, a larger pattern. To this extent, it is inevitably autobiographical.

For me, this is doubly the case, as when I look back at what I have been thinking and speaking and writing and teaching about for more than a decade, it is in fact the relationship between the self and architecture which is perhaps the most prominent recurring theme. (Put another way, it is the relationship between self and architecture which increasingly defines the relationship between myself and architecture.)

So, what follows is the story of my investigations into the nature and significance of this relationship.

This investigation hasn’t followed a single trajectory, or proceeded at a steady pace. Nor can I say that I have yet arrived at any firm conclusions or even that I am much closer to a satisfactory version of events. Consequently, the narrative describing it will have little of the drive or drama of a crime thriller. I can warn you now that there will be few twists, and no denouement. Rather it be will be much closer in form to a short story. The greatest living exponent of that form, Alice Munro, said that ‘a story is not like a road to follow … it is more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the rooms and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from

these windows…’ Of course, in trying to construct that kind of house, it helps if you are Alice Munro.

But, emboldened by her example, I thought I would have a go.

Two more words of warning. Firstly, because I have been around here a while, and have been known to give the occasional lecture, many of you will have heard some of this before, and some of you will have heard a lot of it before. (I suppose I am depending on the assumption that none of you will have heard all of it and at least a few of you will have heard none of it.) And secondly to warn that this will probably not come across as a lecture about architecture in the traditional sense. I would tend to think of it as a lecture for architecture.

So, for the next forty minutes or so, I will show you around some of the rooms in this particular house, and perhaps at the end we can see what the view is like from the windows…

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I In a dark place form and dimensions yet to be devised A voice comes to one in the dark.

Imagine.

Joyce may have written the best endings, but Beckett had the best beginnings. These are the opening words of his late prose piece, Company, published in 1980. Being called ‘Company’, it is of course, entirely concerned with a solitary person, unnamed, prone. The text continues: To one on his back in the dark. This he can tell by the pressure on his hind parts and by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes and again when he opens them again. Only a small part of what is said can be verified. As for example when he hears, You are on your back in the dark. Then he must acknowledge the truth of what is said. But by far the greater part of what is said cannot be verified. As for example when he hears, You first saw the light on such and such a day.

Sometimes the two are combined as for example, You first saw

to lie on their backs in the back and to be addressed by a disembodied voice. You may be relieved at being spared that.

While one can find in Company all the classic Beckettian devices – a setting stripped to essentials, a limited field of activity, an unnamed, incapacitated protagonist, the telescoping of life into the short interval between birth and death – all rendered in remarkable lucid prose, interleaved with this are more lyrical passages of personal memories which, although addressed to the unnamed protagonist in the second person singular, are in fact derived largely from Beckett’s own autobiography. This is him, you sense, coming towards the end, looking back.

Memories are summoned to confirm selfhood.

But they are summoned from without – addressed to their subject by another. In fact, every aspect of the subject’s selfhood is established in this manner: built from without rather than grown from within. Or, more precisely, the self is produced at the meeting point of these two realms. Here, midway through, Beckett’s subject, by now having designated himself M and his addresser W, summarises the situation:

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the light on such and such a day and now you are on your back in the dark. A device perhaps from the incontrovertibility of the one to win credence for the other. That then is the proposition.

To one on his back in the dark a voice tells of a past. With

M so far as follows. On his back in a dark place form and

occasional allusion to a present and more rarely to a future as

dimensions yet to be devised. Hearing on and off a voice of

for example, You will end as you now are. And in another dark or

which uncertain whether addressed to him or to another

in the same another devising it all for company.1

sharing his situation. There being nothing to show when it describes correctly his situation that the description is not for

This opening paragraph (there are 59 in total – one fewer than on a clock face) encapsulates the mood and method of the piece. I have long been fascinated by Company, and have often intended to write about it, although this is actually the first time I have. I first came across this work in 1991 as part of a course I did on Beckett at UCD (my first post-graduate work, you might say) I then saw a staging of it (appropriate given that it was originally intended as a dramatic piece) and subsequently found myself including it in various seminars I taught from about 2001 onwards. In fact one seminar group seriously toyed with the idea of staging a version of Company here in the Red Room, in which the audience would be invited individually 1

Samuel Beckett, Company, Calder, 1991

the benefit of another in the same situation. Vague distress at the vague thought of his perhaps overhearing a confidence when he hears for example, You are on your back in the dark.

Doubts gradually dashed as voice from questing far and wide closes in upon him. When he ceases no other sound than his breath. When it ceases long enough vague hope it may have said its last. Mental activity of a low order. Rare flickers of reasoning of no avail. Hope and despair and suchlike barely felt. How current situation arrived at unclear. No that then to compare to this now. Only eyelids move. When for relief from outer and inner dark they close and open respectively. Other small movements eventually within moderation not to be despaired of. But no improvements by means of such achieved so far. Or on a higher plane by such addition to company as a movement of sustained sorrow or desire or remorse or

UCD ARCHITECTURE YE ARBOOK 2011

II

curiosity or anger and so on. Or by some successful act of intellection as were he to think to himself referring to himself,

Headspace

Since he cannot think he will give up trying. Is there anything to add to this esquisse? His unnamability. Even M must go. So W reminds himself of his creature as so far created. W? But W too is creature. Figment.

Devised deviser devising it all for company. In the same figment dark as his figments.

What is of interest here to me is the way in which Beckett dramatises conscious experience. He opens out what is going on within the head of the protagonist by splitting the self into subject and object – into the devised and the deviser, and then further suggests that it is in fact the devised who devises a deviser in order that he might be devised.

(Devised deviser devising it all for company.) Thus conscious experience is presented as a kind of endlessly recursive feedback loop. (We will see later how prescient that is.)

But if consciousness has a temporal aspect it is also presented as spatial in character, its exact extent expanding and contracting according to where the outside voice locates itself. In a dark place form and dimensions yet to be devised, it is precisely the purpose of the self to devise form and dimension – to set limits and establish relationships, to define space.

So where then are the limits of the space of the self? When we consider our mind, produced by the brain, housed in the skull, do we feel ourselves, like Hamlet, kings of infinite space – a limitless interior realm. Or on the other hand, does our conscious experience manifest itself as a kind of emanation – an expansion outwards into our surroundings?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, my reading of Beckett went hand in hand with an interest in Giacometti. Of course the two knew another, and indeed worked together on the first production of Godot, and even though Giacometti never drew or sculpted Beckett you feel he should have. Or in some images, as if indeed he had.

I am interested in how Giacometti navigates between the human form – the head particularly – and the space around it. In his wonderful book on Giacometti, David Sylvester talks about the way his work ‘singles things out with great emphasis, and even its very positive awareness of the presence of the space surrounding any solid body does not lessen the intensity of its focus upon the body around which the space circulates. This narrow focusing upon a compact form out there in space, this attentiveness to apparent size at a given distance, produce the hallucinatory sense of nearness and farness which is probably the most characteristic feature of Giacometti’s work.’2 Sylvester describes how Giacometti’s tendency (it amounted to a physiological condition) not to correct the relative size of things to take account of how far away they were means that no matter how close you get to one of Giacometti’s sculptures, its distance from you does not seem to change. No more detailed information becomes available to the eye, and a constant framing space is maintained around the forms (often through the device of the plinth or base).

Of his painted and drawn portraits something like the opposite might be said – that no matter how far away the subject seems on the canvas, one seems always to be looking close up. The face hovers in a very shallow depth of field – everything around the centre dissolves into relative indistinction. The effect, I think is to allow us inhabit the space of the sitter – to side with them. You almost feel the same relationship with their nose as you do with your own.

And with the hinterland of your face – your cheeks

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2

David Sylvester, Looking at Giacometti, Pimlico, 1996

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(felt but unseen) sliding back towards your ears.

Dimensions and edges palpable but indistinct. (I am reminded in passing of some of Platon’s recent photos of world leaders, which have an almost indecent intimacy about them, and in getting close, seem to distort familiar features.)

Sylvester’s description of Giacometti’s working method as connecting ‘an often extreme rapidity of execution to an extreme persistency of effort’3 is confirmed in the pages of James Lord’s A Giacometti Portrait, where we read his description of sitting for a portrait over a series of months, each day coming back to find the artist erasing the work of the previous session in order to begin again on what he declared the futile task of creating a meaningful likeness.

In his photos of the process we see the head repeatedly coming into focus and dissipating again.

Is it just as a result of this constant process of erasure and overlay that his heads acquire their distinctive penumbras of painted space? Or might this ambiguous boundary be interpreted as, on the one hand, a reflection of the difficulties for the painter in rendering what is seen (You never copy the glass on the table; you copy the residue of a vision …

Each time I look at the glass, it seems to be remaking itself, that is to say, its reality becomes uncertain, because its projection in my head is uncertain, or partial. You see it as if it were disappearing, coming into view again, disappearing, coming into view again – that’s to say, it is really always is between being and not being. And that is what one wants to copy.4) And on the other hand, a depiction of the shifting, uncertain dimensions of the self.

And while in these existentialist studies, the self is the subject of intense, uninterrupted concentration, for me, what progressively became more interesting was the question of how the sense of self is framed by the space that surrounds it.

At first, my interest was in the intimate spaces of domesticity and creative work. I looked at Francis Bacon’s studio and subsequently at Pierre Bonnard’s

house at Le Cannet, and the extraordinary selfportraits he made there late in his life – the painter reduced to a floating, flayed presence in the mirror.

Then, in 2000, I remember being struck by the image of Cathy Freeman in the moments following her victory in the 400m at the Sydney Olympics in 2000.

What interested me was the complete disjunction between the jubilant celebrations resonating through the vast stadium and the figure of Freeman, alone, contemplative, coming to terms with her achievement.

And I thought too about the battery of telephoto lenses trained on her during these moments, beaming her private reverie across the world.

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3

Ibid. p. 132

4

Ibid. p. 47

UCD ARCHITECTURE YE ARBOOK 2011

III Architecture and consciousness All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it; (Did you think it was in the white or gray stone? or the lines of the arches and cornices?)

All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments; It is not the violins and the cornets – it is not the oboe nor the beating drums, nor the score of the baritone singer singing his sweet romanza – nor that of the men’s chorus, nor that of the women’s chorus,

It is nearer and farther than they.

—Walt Whitman, from Carol of Occupations, in Leaves of Grass, 1900

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In a lot of my work in recent years I have been trying to find the right way to say that architecture – as created and experienced – is a phenomenon that shares many of the characteristic properties of consciousness. What I think it comes down to is this: that in its capacity to give conceptual, functional, sensory and symbolic coherence to ‘mere matter’, architecture can be considered analogous to consciousness for the way that it confers coherence and continuity upon the ‘raw data’ of experience and sensation. And just as consciousness is understood as something quite separate and distinct from the mass of neural activity which ultimately produces it, so architecture must ultimately be seen as something ‘over and above’ the physical facts of its existence.

In the process of coming into being and in how it is experienced, it is, in Whitman’s terms ‘nearer and farther than they’.5 Imbuing space with form, purpose and significance is central to the activity of architecture. And discerning those same properties is, in turn, critical to the meaningful experience of 5

An early version of some of this thinking was published in Building Material, the journal of the Architectural Association of Ireland, vol. 17, Winter 2007

architecture. These properties might be regarded as integral to the very fabric of the built space, but they may also be seen as aspects of a quite separate and distinct unifying conceptual or ‘ideational’ force.

The space of the Pantheon, for instance, can be explained as a circular domed enclosure of certain dimensions and certain materials, lit centrally through an open oculus. But something more than that is communicated by the space itself – a higher organisational idea, a proposition about a spatial order which is simultaneously abstract and embodied. The physical facts of the building are the only phenomena verifiably present, so the quality must derive from them, and yet it seems of a different order and type. Architecture is born of, but ultimately distinct from, building. It is worth noting how Whitman’s phrasing – his redundant repetition of the ‘it’ – seems to replicate the manner in which we must trip over the facts of building to get to the mental phenomena of ‘what we do to it when we look at it…’

So, architecture may reside ultimately in the ‘it’ of building, but according to Whitman, ‘it’ is something produced by the conscious subject.

Which brings me to consciousness. The field of consciousness studies – spanning everything from neuroscience to philosophy – has expanded enormously in the past two decades. There are two problems which dominate a lot of the discussions.

The first is the binding problem – the question of how it is that, from the sum of the ceaseless neural activity in the brain a coherent and continuous sense of self can, without effort, be assembled, bound together and sustained. How is it that I continue to be I through everything I encounter every day? The second problem, the so-called ‘hard problem’ refers to the challenge that, even if we could explain every single aspect of brain activity, we would still not be able to isolate and account for the sensation of conscious experience. The hard problem has created a kind of fault line within the field, with on the one hand the ‘mysterians’ – including figures such as David Chalmers – asserting that consciousness is a distinct and separate phenomenon. And on the other hand, the materialists, who argue that it is the very conditions which produce conscious experience that also create the compelling illusion that it must emerge

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from somewhere else. This is the famous ‘Ghost in the Machine’ to which Gilbert Ryle referred in The Concept of Mind. (‘Devised deviser devising it all for company’) Following Ryle, generations of ‘materialist’ theorists of consciousness have been at pains to disavow the presence of such ghosts, even while acknowledging that there is something deeply counter-intuitive and difficult to grasp about the idea that there is nothing more to our conscious experience than the sum total of millions of neurons firing. When Francis Crick proposed as much, he had the perspicacity to label it ‘The Astonishing Hypothesis’.6 In his magisterial book Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett, one of the most dedicated of the materialists, chips away methodically and relentlessly at the intuitions and ‘folk psychology’ which make the astonishing hypothesis so hard to accept. The real difficulty is that we consider consciousness not just as the sum total of the activities of thinking, acting, sensing and remembering and so on, but as our ongoing awareness of this activity. Our sense of self and our conscious experience seem to be fundamentally premised on this capacity always to be aware of our own being, to appreciate automatically what the neurologist Antonio Damasio calls ‘the feeling of what happens’.7 In the traditional view of consciousness, as Dennett characterises it, there must be some ‘Central Meaner’, overseeing and directing mental activity. Sensations and thoughts, although evidently the result of brain activity, must get played out in the ‘Cartesian Theatre’ before they can properly become part of consciousness.

In place of this ‘Cartesian dualism’, Dennett elaborates what he calls the Multiple Drafts theory

in which, as he writes, ‘there is no single, definitive ‘stream of consciousness’ […] Instead […] there are multiple channels in which specialist circuits try, in parallel pandemoniums, to do their various things, creating Multiple Drafts as they go.’8 Unity of consciousness is an illusion, albeit a powerful one. Consciousness, for Dennett, is ‘gappy and discontinuous’, given stability only by an evolving ‘Centre of Narrative Gravity’, which allows our mental activity to coalesce around certain patterns and thus produce a coherent and continuous sense of self. Rather than having any originary status, the self is something continuously enacted through perception and experience. The sensation of consciousness – the ‘what it is like’ to be a sentient human – is a kind of by-product of the processes of perception, a fiction we construct to lend coherence and continuity to our life experience.9 Consciousness is the result of mental activity rather than the originator of it.

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Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, London: Penguin, (1993), p. 253–4. Dennett continues: ‘The basic specialists are part of our animal heritage. They were not developed to perform peculiarly human actions, such as reading and writing, but ducking, predator-avoiding, face-recognizing, grasping, throwing, berrypicking, and other essential tasks. They are often opportunistically enlisted in new roles, for which their native talents more or less suit them. The result is not bedlam only because the trends that are imposed on all this activity are themselves the product of design. Some of this design in innate, and is shared with other animals. But it is augmented, and sometimes even overwhelmed in importance, by micro-habits of thought that are developed in the individual, partly idiosyncratic results of self-exploration and partly pre-designed gifts of culture. Thousands of memes, mostly borne by language, but also by wordless ‘images’ and other data structures, take up residence in an individual brain,

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Works of major ‘materialists’. Ryle, Crick, Dennett, the Churchlands, Humphrey etc.

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shaping its tendencies and thereby turning it into a mind.’

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Dennett quotes David Hume: For my part, when I enter most

Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, body, emotion

intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some

and the making of consciousness, London: Vintage, (2000), p. 30

particular perception or other of heat and cold, light or shade, love

‘Consciousness begins when brains acquire the power, the simple

or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time

power I must add, of telling a story without words, the story that

without a perception, and never can observe anything but the

there is a life ticking away in an organism, and that the states of the

perception. But while for Hume, writing in 1739, this incapacity

living organism, within body bounds, are continuously being altered

to separate self from perception might have been frustration, for

by encounters with objects or events in its environment, or, for that

Dennett it is simply an accurate reflection of the self’s inchoate,

matter, by thoughts and by internal adjustments of the life process.’

endlessly evolving nature.

UCD ARCHITECTURE YE ARBOOK 2011

(We have been looking at drawings made by Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, from slides made using the Gogli method of staining – a metallic imprint – which then had to be drawn. Among other insights gained from this method was the discovery that rather than a complete web of cells, each cell ‘has multiple branches covered with “frost”, embracing an amazingly large space with their undulations. A slender fibre that originated from the cell elongated over enormous distances and suddenly opened out in a spray of inummerable sprouting fibres…’10] For the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey there is an evolutionary logic to the emergence of consciousness. As the processing of perception begins to happen at a remove from the site of its generation (i.e. as central brains begin to evolve in organisms), there is a concomitant development away from immediate, responsive action towards reflexive perception. A gap opens between action and reaction. It is in this gap that sensation, and hence self-awareness, emerges. Where once there was only the bare capacity to react to external stimuli, there is now an added ability to be aware of and control that action. Sensation, in other words, is reaction reacted to. In evolutionary terms, the capacity of humans to receive a continuously updated report on our own condition confers clear advantages. Consciousness may be an illusion – a by-product of the perceptual process – but for Humphrey it is a ‘deliberate trick’ rather than ‘an honest error’, a trick which, because it allows us to survive and flourish, becomes increasingly part of our genetic make-up.11 Central to Humphrey’s explanation is the idea that consciousness evolves from the outside in rather than, as might more usually be thought, from the inside outwards. As reactions to external stimuli evolve into internal states of reflection, consciousness perpetuates the feeling of there being a slight distance between the organism and what happens to it. (again, remember Beckett) Thus,

even when we are examining our own actions and mental activity, we replicate the manner in which we examine the world beyond.12 In support of this argument, Humphrey details recent research by VS Ramachandran and others on the prevalence of so-called ‘mirror neurons’ in the brain. These are ‘neurons that link the observation of someone else having a sensation to the execution of a similar sensation oneself.’13 For Humphrey, these mirror neurons are evidence of the outward-directed nature of consciousness. If the human brain has produced consciousness as a kind of hyper-evolved version of our reactions to other organisms and environments, it is hardly surprising that it should retain a pronounced capacity for what Humphrey chooses to define as ‘empathy’.

It is striking that, in elaborating recent insights from neuroscience, Humphrey would invoke a whole body of work in aesthetics form the late nineteenth century known as empathy theory and centred on what Mitchell Schwarzer has termed ‘the consolidating perception between object and subject.’14 In empathy theory, the ideas constantly forming and reforming in the active mind are explained as attempts to conceptualise the perceived world in the human image. As Heinrich Wölfflin saw it, ‘forms become meaningful to us only because we recognize in them the expression of a sentient soul. Instinctively we animate each object…

We read our own image into all phenomena’.15 Similar ideas were specifically related to architecture in Geoffrey Scott’s The Architecture of Humanism on 1914, in which he proposed

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12 This is particularly noticeable in young children of 4 and 5, who, although speaking in the first person, often report on their own feelings and desires in a surprisingly objective, distanced manner.

Some would argue that it is precisely the use of language that produces this ‘distancing’ effect – that remakes the child as the ‘first person singular’.

13 p. 106 14 Mitchell Schwarzer, ‘The Emergence of Architectural Space: August Schmarzow’s Theory of Raumgestaltung (spatial forming)’,

10 Ramón y Cajal, Histology of the nervous system of man and vertebrates, NY: OUP, (1995), cited in Carl Schoonover, Portraits of the Mind, NY: Abrams, (2010), p. 51 11 Ibid. p. 127

Assemblage 15, (August 1991) 15 Heinrich Wölfflin, Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture, translated and published in Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou eds, op.cit., pp. 149–192, p. 152

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that ‘the true basis of critical appreciation’ is the simple idea that ‘we have looked at the building and identified ourselves with its apparent state.

We have transcribed ourselves into terms of architecture.’ The echoes of Whitman are obvious.

Equally he continues, ‘the whole of architecture is, in fact, unconsciously invested by us with human movement and human moods… We transcribe architecture into terms of ourselves.’16 In 1977, Rudolph Arnheim’s idiosyncratic book The Dynamics of Architectural Form sought to establish similar parallels between bodily dispositions and built form. More interestingly for my purposes however, Arnheim argued that thought itself had formal characteristics in common with architecture: ‘All good thinking, then, can be said to aspire to the condition of architecture’, he wrote, elaborating that ‘since all human thoughts must be worked out in the medium of perceptual space, architecture, wittingly or not, presents embodiments of thought when it invents and builds shapes.’17

The depiction of the interior Recently I have begun to think of photography as the medium through which this ‘perceptual space’ – according to Arnheim the shared realm of architecture and conscious thought (or at least good thinking!) – might be most fruitfully revealed.

Through a graduate seminar called ‘Space Framed’, which I teach with Alice Clancy, and a series of conference papers, I have been investigating how the philosophy and practice of photography has applied itself to the depiction of built space. The image of the Pantheon by Thomas Struth which I showed earlier is in fact a perfect example of a photographer’s deliberate interest in the portrayal not just of the space itself but also of the originating idea of that space and of the way in which it is understood and experienced. (Further evidenced by his plays with portraiture and pictorial space.)

I would like to conclude this lecture by looking a little more closely at two recent examples of the depiction of the architectural interior. In both cases, these photographic works stand as images in their own right – each forms part of an established and distinguished artistic practice. And in each case, the architecture portrayed exemplifies a very particular philosophy and sensibility. So already, a kind of dialogue has opened up in these pictures between photographic intentions and architectural ambitions.

At the same time, I would suggest that both sets of images also pay attention to the phenomenological qualities of the spaces they depict – they are interested in conveying what it is like to be in them.

Or even – thinking back to the precepts of empathy theory – what it is like to be them. They might each be considered spatial portraits.

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Höfer – Niedermayr

16 Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism – a study in the history of taste, London: Methuen, (1961), (first published 1914) Chapter VIII, Humanist Values, p. 81.

17 Rudolf Arnheim, The Dynamics of Architectural Form, London: University of California Press, (1977), p. 274

The first is a series of photographs made by Candida Höfer of the Neues Museum in Berlin between the completion of its reconstruction by David Chipperfield and Julian Harrap and the installation of its permanent exhibition in late

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2009.18 Candida Höfer is the most senior of the so-called Dusseldorf School of photographers.

Along with Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, she was among the first to be taught there by Bernd and Hille Becher. From the Bechers she inherited a commitment to the extensive documentation of specific architectural types and to a ‘straight’, objective mode of picturemaking. Since the mid-eighties, Höfer has, almost exclusively, photographed public and institutional interiors. Working initially with a 35mm camera, she introduced a 6 × 6cm Hasselblad to her practice in 1994, and has more recently used a large-format camera making digital prints. At each stage, the change in equipment has enabled an increase in the scale of her exhibition prints. Her viewpoints have also changed. In her earlier work, she tended to look diagonally across a space from one corner. (Among other things, this would allow her accommodate the full dimensions of the space within the frame of the picture) More recently she has relied increasingly on a somewhat elevated, centralised, single-point perspective.

But, although the technique has matured, the subject matter has remained constant. Höfer is interested in the sober, scrupulous depiction of interior space. While her chosen spaces vary significantly in type, size and age – from Venetian palazzi and scuoli to research laboratories and municipal libraries – they are almost invariably depicted absent of people, but full of the signs and equipment of occupation. Many commentators on Höfer’s pictures have drawn attention to their qualities of stillness and quietude but also to a slight feeling of distance or absence which they induce.

time she evinces the photographs ability to give ‘blankness an emotional plentitude’.19 So, these are pictures which, in depicting empty spaces, are paradoxically full of presence. In fact it is their very quality of emptiness which makes them so vividly present. They seem to invite occupation. Here, however, another paradox emerges. In his recent treatment of the work, Michael Fried has argued that Höfer’s photographs have an ‘absorptive’ quality. Unlike what Fried terms ‘theatrical’ works, they do not rely on the viewer to complete them.20 They are self-sufficient. In a recent interview, Höfer appeared to confirm this quality by referring to her photographs as ‘more static, more in themselves… sitting in themselves’.

In the specific case of the Neues Museum, this quality of absorbed attentiveness means that the building’s layers of history resonate strongly through the images. In dealing with the building Chipperfield’s overall strategy has been clearly to distinguish between existing fabric and new additions. But it is in fact where the clarity of this distinction breaks down where the architecture is at its most powerful. Responding to a question about making decisions on ‘value and hierarchy’ on site, Chipperfield abandoned his usual position of detached conceptual clarity and spoke of his many close-up encounters with the fabric of the building, and of being faced ultimately with trying to find the point at which all the inert material, new and old, from which each of these spaces is ultimately composed, comes to life.21 It is precisely these moments which Höfer’s pictures reveal.

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19 Candida Höfer, The Architecture of Absence,

Sequence

New York: Aperture, (2004) 20 The discussion is in Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as

In one of Höfer’s major exhibition publications, The Architecture of Absence, Mary-Kay Lombino describes the work as ‘achieving complete clarity and evoking detached tranquility’. At the same

Art as never Before, New Haven: Yale University Press, (2008) and refers in turn to Fried’s introduction of the terms theatricality and absorption in his seminal publication Art and Objecthood, and his later elaboration of those themes in relation to the work of Gustave Courbet and others.

18 Although they have not yet been exhibited, an extensive selection

21 The response was made at a lecture in National Gallery, Dublin,

of the photographs is published in David Chipperfield Architects in

11th November 2010. Chipperfield showed several composite

collaboration with Julian Harrap, Neues Museum Berlin, Cologne:

photographic survey images of room elevations which make an

Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, (2009)

interesting counterpoint to Höfer’s images.

SENSATION

INAUGURAL LECTURE / HUGH CAMPBELL

My second example is a series of diptychs made of works by SANAA by the Italian photographer Walter Niedermayr. By contrast with the formal restraint of Höfer’s work, Niedermayr’s images seem more overtly concerned with atmosphere and feeling. He has spoken about how his practice has ‘moved from a documentary approach to being about forming and representing an impression of space.’22 Niedermayr had initially become well known for his large-scale images of skiers and climbers traversing Alpine landscapes. His interest was in depicting the figures in relative scale to the landscape so that the feeling of the setting’s vastness would be vividly conveyed.

He subsequently began exploring interiors with the same photographic language, so that they too are rendered as floating spatial fields.

As he explains, ‘nothing in the image should dominate, so that all the elements have the same valence and visibility, from people to objects and architectural structures.’23 Niedermayr makes multiple technical adjustments at every stage of the photographic process – prolonging exposure times, using strong filters, lightening the print during development, reducing colour densities while enlarging the images – all in the service of trying to get closer to an essential spatial and mental experience: ‘The most exciting moment is always when you are perceiving the space with all of your senses and the image, or the idea of the image, takes shape in your mind. Then comes the making of the picture…’ Niedermayr explains in a 2003 interview ‘This experience of space has nothing to do with architecture’ he goes on rather surprisingly to assert. ‘An architect would probably have no interest in my images as documents of his or her work.’24 However, in SANAA, Niedermayr acknowledges that he has found distinct echoes of his own sensibility and aesthetic. He refers approvingly to what he calls the ‘densified

simplicity’ of their work. SANAA in turn enjoy the way in which these pictures seem to get back to the underlying ‘idea’ of the architecture, to the initial dream of what the spaces might be like: ‘Sometimes we are surprised by the images in that they get to something that is very much our work but not before seen by us’ explains Nishizawa ‘…because we share a sensibility the photograph always has some strong connection to the ‘purest’ intentions of the work.’25 For Sejima, architecture often corresponds more closely to what she sees in the mind’s eye, than to the finished building. It is as if the wants the building to remain always on the edge of becoming.

One finds echoes of this attitude in the work of their contemporary Sou Fujimito who in his text Primitive Future, spoke of making an ‘in-between architecture’. He refers to Le Thoronet:

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In Le Thoronet, it is difficult to understand if the light came first or the stone came first. That is because it may be a state prior to division into light and object. To make architecture is perhaps to produce a primal unified condition, just before the division into light and object, space and object, natural and artificial, inside and outside, city and house, large and small. This is primal and simultaneously diverse, lucid and simultaneously utterly incomprehensible.

Prior to the division of light and dark, prior to the division of sound and silence.26

22 Notes by Alice Clancy on Niedermayr lecture, Copenhagen, January 2011 23 Marion Piffer-Damiani in conversation with Walter Niedermayr, in Walter Niedermayr, Civil Operations, Hatje Cantz, (2003), pp. 160–162 24 Ibid. p. 161

25 Conversation with Ryue Nishisawa as part of roundtable discussion chaired by author on Empathy and Imagination at Venice Biennale, Thursday 26th August 2010 26 In 2G 50, Sou Fujimoto

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There at the same place as then

Bloom of adulthood. Imagine a whiff of that. On your back in the dark you remember. Ah you you remember. Cloudless

In both these cases, I hope that the rhyme between built space and photographic space has become clear. But I think too that it is also possible to discern a larger resonance between the ‘perceptual space’ thus produced and the feeling of conscious experience. Thus, Niedermayr’s images might be seen as the embodiment of Humphrey’s ‘thick moment’ of consciousness – a floating evanescence of pure sensation. Höfer’s images on the other hand – single rather than paired, symmetrical organized around a centre rather than dispersed towards edges, seem born of a wide-awake world in which everything is lucid, deliberate, knowable. One set of images reveals a prevailing sense, the other, an animating idea. Consciousness combines both. Out of the ceaseless, humming hive of neuronal activity, consciousness miraculously emerges as something singular, continuous and accessible. And when the conscious mind meets architecture, it discovers, in the complex ways in which space is animated by idea and illuminated by experience, something like it’s own echo.

A few weeks ago, the biographer of Le Corbusier stood here and gave an indecently detailed lecture on his eventful life. There were a lot of things that will stick in the memory, but I was struck most forcibly by his recounting of Corb’s reaction, as a young man, to Milan cathedral. As Nicholas Fox Weber told it, Corbusier was just so overwhelmed by the sheer fact and presence of built space that he stayed in the square for two days coming to terms with it. It was if he was ingesting the whole nature and purpose of architecture at once. And as if he was seeing himself for the first time.

I think, when it effects us, architecture does so because, in its spaces and lineaments, our minds find themselves echoed, amplified, allowed to resonate. From ‘a dark place form and dimensions yet to be devised’ we come to the simple, comforting facts of built space – of form and dimension, of light framed, of memories housed. Having begun with Beckett, let’s give him the last words:

May day. She joins you in the little summerhouse. A rustic hexahedron. Entirely of logs. Both larch and fir. Six feet across.

Eight from floor to vertex. Area twenty-four square feet to furthest decimal. Two small multicoloured lights vis-à-vis.

Small stained diamond panes. Under each a ledge. There on summer Sundays after his midday meal your father loved to retreat with Punch and with a cushion. The waist of his trousers unbuttoned he sat on the ledge turning the pages.

You on the other with your feet dangling. When he chuckled you tried to chuckle. When his chuckle died yours too. That you should try to imitate his chuckle pleased and tickled him greatly and sometimes he would chuckle for no other reason than to hear you try to chuckle too. Sometimes you turn your head and look out through a rose-red pane. You press your little nose against the pane and all without is rosy. The years

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have flown and there at the same place as then you sit in the bloom of adulthood bathed in rainbow light gazing before you.

(following spread) Prof. Hugh Campbell’s Inaugural Lecture Photo by Stephen Tierney

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SENSATION

STUDIOS / FOUNDATION / SEMESTER 1

Six Memos for Making a Dwelling Dublin City

Tutors Chris Boyle Geoff Brouder Sarah Cremin Peter Cody Cian Deegan Michelle Fagan Merlo Kelly Matt McCullagh Ruth O’Herlihy Mark Price James Rossa O’Hare Stephen Tierney

Students Assam Aied Ronan Atkins Maryam Bakhtvar Christina Benn Dylan Callanan Paul Campbell Patrick Carey William Conran Maeve Counihan Cianan Crowley Deborah Cullinan Ellen Curtin Fiona Dempsey Eoin Diamond Ian Donnelly Sorcha Duffy Rebecca Dunne Aoibhin Egan Patrick Farrell Cormac Friel Conor Gibson White Hugo Hickey Andrew Horlick Ruanne Hunt Miriam Keane Jenny Keating Alex Kelly Gerard Kelly Fatah Lana Sam Le Bas

David Lee Dinh Lee Cherry Leung Ciaran Long David Mahon Robyn Marren Eoghan McCarty Ruth McDonnell Donal McElwaine Cillian McGarry Simon McGough Roisin McHugh Emma Melvin Aoife Morris Emer Murray Philippa Nic Grianna Keara Nichol Andrea Nolan Michelle O’Byrne Gillian O’Connell Amy O’Connor Kevin O’Brien Shona O’Keeffe Fiona O’Regan Roisin Power Sarah Sheehan Kim Sukyoung Lily Toomey Edward White Jennifer Wilson

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UCD ARCHITECTURE YE ARBOOK 2011

Memo No. 1 The Horizontal and Vertical Plane Using only the horizontal and vertical planes to form the structure of a simple Studio Space, architectural ideas such as structure, enclosure, plan, section, daylight and inhabitation were explored.

Memo No. 2 Positive and Negative Space Investigating the concepts of positive and negative space, ‘a missing room’ was added to a notional house plan to act as a vestibule, and to connect the other 9 rooms of the house. Plaster models were cast at 1:20.

Memo No. 3 The Survey of a House and Representing Domestic Space Six Dublin houses from different eras were observed, measured, sketched, drawn and described. Learning from the buildings encountered daily, the challenge was posed of translating what was seen into drawings and text.

Memo No. 4 Attention to Detail Within the context of the Japanese Teahouse a study was made of the elaborate timber joinery methods used to build it, with the aim of understanding how they could express both technical and cultural ideas.

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Memo No. 5 Illumination and Illusion

The John Soane Museum was studied as an agglomeration, an accretion, a collection and a sketchbook. Modelling of a space within the house at 1:20 was followed by a careful photo-survey of the same space during a class visit.

Memo No. 6 The Idea of a House By taking one piece or body of work previously made as a starting point, generated by anyone within the studio, a new piece of work was made to develop a new level of clarity and expression of the idea embodied by the original proposal.

(following spread) Timber workshop, Memo No. 4 Photo by Stephen Tierney

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SENSATION

STUDIOS / FOUNDATION / SEMESTER 1

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(above) Section through a studio space Shane O’Keeffe

(opposite) Axonometric of a brick stair Michelle O’Byrne

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STUDIOS / FOUNDATION / SEMESTER 1

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(above & opposite) Constructional drawing of dwelling Dylan Callanan

SENSATION

STUDIOS / FOUNDATION / SEMESTER 1

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(above) Worm’s eye axonometrics of the John Soane House Ruth McDonnell

(opposite) Precedent models, Memo No. 5 Photo by Stephen Tierney

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SENSATION

EXHIBITION / FOUNDATION / SEMESTER 1

The Horizontal and Vertical Plane 24th September–6th October 2010

Curators Chris Boyle Matt McCullagh

Using only the horizontal and vertical planes to form the structure of a simple Studio Space, architectural ideas such as structure, enclosure, plan, section, daylight and inhabitation were explored by Y1 students. A working process included techniques of sketching, study model, written description, measured drawing, presentation model and photography. The studies concluded with a group exhibition where each individual student’s model was placed within a collective base structure, formed as an open stud wall, the actual construction element of the Studio Spaces.

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Front Room Exhibition Photo by Stephen Tierney

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SENSATION

EXHIBITION / FOUNDATION / SEMESTER 1

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(above & opposite) Models in situ Photos by Stephen Tierney

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SENSATION

POSITION / JOHN TUOMEY

Strategies for an Urban Society John Tuomey

“Society is divided into factions, but I build for everybody” —Alvar Aalto, in a TV interview, 1972

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UCD ARCHITECTURE YE ARBOOK 2011

Strategies for an Urban Society is this year’s thematic preoccupation in Architecture at UCD, an intellectual and ethical umbrella under which we have chosen to gather the various components of our studio-based learning. Suburbanisation is a prevalent threat to the life-culture of town and landscape. And this pattern of planning has generated a formless patchwork of islanded, disconnected communities. Zoning policies have segregated housing estates, schools, workplaces and places of leisure. People’s everyday interaction is limited by socially meaningless boundaries and distributor roads divide otherwise integral aspects of daily life. Contemporary value systems have given rise to a highly developed sense of individual entitlement. Recent constructions provide little evidence of a broader societal cohesion beyond the strong tradition of family connection and with the exception of particular communities of common purpose. In all of our architectural endeavours we need to remind ourselves of the larger culture, a wider sense of society. Project-specific design responses should be underpinned by strategic thinking at the urban scale.

Weather and Light Our perception of architecture depends on physical phenomena. The refreshment of the Irish climatic elements, of rain, wind and sunlight, bring variety and change to our appreciation of passive building material. We should design with the weather in mind, not only for environmentally measurable results, but also to provoke more immeasurable responses and to enhance vital pleasures. The playful manipulation of weather and light needs to be considered in parallel with more the functionally disciplined integration of structure and space. Student project work might help us imagine new ways to hear the sound of harnessed rainwater, how porches might provide generous moments of shelter from the wind and how sunlight’s decoration enhances our lively experience of architecture in action.

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Now consider human lives, their every-minute every-day lives! Their lives depend on an agreed regularity to which each contributes. Maintaining this regularity is the forgotten practice I’m talking about. It explains the arrival of the fruit in the market each day, the lights in the street at night, the letters slipped under the front door, the matches in a match box all pointing in the same direction, music heard on the radio, smiles exchanged between strangers. The regularity has a beat, very distant, often inaudible, and at the same time similar to a heartbeat. No place for illusions here. The beat doesn’t stop solitude, it doesn’t cure pain, you can’t telephone it – it’s simply a reminder that you belong to a shared story.

—John Berger, From A to X, a Story in Letters

John Berger’s beautiful description of human civilisation, our collective ecosystem, reminds us of our rightful place in the world. This was the challenge, the research question that we proposed for our studios, for staff and students to consider across the year.

SENSATION

Continuity

THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5

Tutors Will Dimond Kevin Donovan Students Michael Fingleton Alison Hyland Hugh Queenan Conor Rochford Ekaterina Samodurova

Conor Rochford made studies of the grain, topography and structure of the canal and its neighbourhoods. He identified a potential

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overlap between the closed environment of third level college, the undervalued commercial/ industrial workplaces of neighbouring streets and the ‘back-of-house’ character of the canal, and developed a project to house visual arts studies and existing light industrial uses in the context of a new canalside public space.

UCD ARCHITECTURE YE ARBOOK 2011

An investigation of the processes by which we can make architecture that is rooted in place. Using parallel processes relating to site, construction and inhabitation we aspire to make projects which complement their place, are robust and enduring.

Students studied the Grand Canal in Dublin, an infrastructure which marks the edge of the historic city, and its significance as a connector for areas that developed as servant to the consolidated city core but whose functions were instrumental to sustaining it and were engines to its subsequent development. These places developed their own character, urban and industrial infrastructure and the communities to sustain them. With the gradual diminution of their commercial significance these parts of the city became impoverished and fragmented but retained a strong identity marking the inner city edge. The post-industrial legacy here is a territory for re-evaluation and provides opportunities for densification/re-use/re-connection.

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(opposite) Tectonic montage Conor Rochford

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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5

38 Alison Hyland

(above)

Historically, architecture has been pertinent

An industrious canal

to overcoming nature through symbolising the

Michael Fingleton

structures and cosmological attitudes of a given society. Today science is addressing a new

(below)

problem; overcoming knowledge. To address

Contextual Model

this challenge, by representing an ambiguity

Alison Hyland

between structure and ornament, the design of The Factory of Science strives to create an analogy between architectural and biological processes; in an effort to ultimately blur the didactical horizon between science and architecture.

UCD ARCHITECTURE YE ARBOOK 2011

Michael Fingleton was interested in the history of Portobello as a former hub of activity on the canal and studied its diverse community and housing typologies. His project for a new bathing house and canal basin, with associated water filtration systems, stitches into the still extant processes of the canal in an attempt to re-unite waterway and community.

Hugh Queenan investigated the relationship between hidden communities and the public sphere. In his project for a therapeutic community he inhabits a disused pocket of land between a forgotten arboreal refuge and the more public transitory condition of the canal.

Ekaterina Samodurova is interested in

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cultural identity and the translation of old cultural traditions into unfamiliar contexts.

She made studies of patterns of inhabitation of the urban context by ethnic and religious minorities, and went on to develop a project for an Orthodox Church and community centre inhabiting a backland canalside site.

(above) Therapeutic community Hugh Queenan

(left) Orthodox Church and centre canal perspective Ekaterina Samodurova

SENSATION

The Idea of the Common Exhibition and Pecha Kucha 22nd October–5th November 2010

Front Room Exhibitions 24th September – 6th October 2010 The horizontal and vertical plane – Foundation Year

15th – 20th October 2010 Opening Shot – A photography exhibition

EXHIBITION / SEMESTER 1

A series of Pecha Kucha presentations on pubic space were followed by an exhibition opening of four designs carried out over recent years by seven Dublin architects, for small urban spaces.

Participants ABK Architects Alan Mee Dermot Foley Landscape Architects Gerry Cahill Architects GKMP Architects O’Donnell Tuomey Architects Dr. Samantha Martin-McAuliffe

22nd October – 5th November 2010 The Idea of Common

21st February – 11th March 2011 The Tracing Floor – Niall McLaughlin Architects

4th – 18th April 2011 Watertowers of Ireland – Jamie Young

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18th – 22nd May 2011 Imagine Chapelizod

(opposite) Front Room Exhibition Photo by Stephen Tierney

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SENSATION

WORKSHOP / MIDDLE SCHOOL / SEMESTER 1

Intermedia Workshops

Workshops The Drawing Room Wendy Barrett, Paul Durcan and John Parker 2D Sectional Elevation

In Perspective John Barry Lowe, Fiona Hughes and Donal O’Herlihy Sectional Perspective

Lightroom Alice Clancy, Paul Kenny and Laura O’Brien Model-making and Photography

Overdraw Chris Boyle Multi-layered hand drawings

Cast and Relief Kevin Donovan, Stephen Mulhall and Aoibheann Ní Mhearain Plaster Casting

Material Images James Rossa O’Hare and David Healy

“One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water’1

In this observation Marshall McLuhan refers to the ground-rules and latent effects of our media environment. Fish have no sense of water as they have no ‘anti-environment ‘ from which they can experience it. When we are immersed in something we become blind to it. This could be an environment, a culture, a work method or spatial understanding itself.

The Intermedia workshops took place mid-way through the semester and their purpose was to provide the opportunity for a shift in medium as a means to progress the design project and equip the students with new work methods.

In the spirit of Kahn’s statement that, “Architecture comes from the making of a room … the room is a place of the mind”2 each workshop explored a specific space in the design project through a particular medium or combination of media – be that plaster-cast, photography, perspective or orthographics.

This act of exploring a space through its representation allowed the student to notionally inhabit this space thus enabling them to identify and clarify their ideas about tectonics, materiality, light and inhabitation. The sense of interiority that developed often then drove the project spatially and from within, in tandem with a more formal or object-based design approach.

Crucial to the workshops was the idea of representation as a mode of both interpretation and generation of architecture.

In his essay ‘Representation as Research: Design Model and Media Rotation’, Dagmar Reinhart makes the argument for representation, “as an instrument of invention which is not an end product but an active component at phases of ideation, conceptualisation, experimentation and visualisation in the creative design process.”3 In this way, the workshops proposed representation as an operative and explorative methodology rather than a mere tool of illustration – in Reinhart’s words it can be a “strategy for producing ideas.”

As Diana Agrest4 has noted any system of representation such as perspective is not just a technique but an ideology that allows for a rationale to be developed. This can make the representation seem natural and thus invisible as such.

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Computer modelling/Charcoal and paper relief 1

McLuhan, Marshall. War and Peace in the Global Village. Gingko Press, (2001)

2

Kahn, Louis I. Drawings for City/2 Exhibition: Architecture Comes from the Making of

3

Reinhardt, Dagmar. ‘Representation as research: Design Model and Media

4

Allen, Stan & Agrest, Diana. Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation.

a Room. Charcoal, Philadelphia, PA, Museum of Art (1971)

(opposite) Intermedia Workshop opening Photo by Alice Clancy

Rotation’, The RIBA Journal of Architecture, Vol. 13, No. 2, (2008)

Routledge, (2000)

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SENSATION

WORKSHOP / MIDDLE SCHOOL / SEMESTER 1

These modes of representation are therefore not neutral but instrumental in the generation of architecture, as seen in the close correlation of perspective and Renaissance urban spaces. This instrumental aspect of representation is something to which we as architects are often blind.

In his treatise ‘L’espace indicible,’ Le Corbusier proposed a new theory of architecture, that held space to be, “ineffable”, meaning that it could not be described or represented, only experienced directly as a “vibration” between the “action of the work (architecture, statue, or painting)” and the “reaction of the setting: the walls of the room, the public squares … the landscape.”5 This resonates with Loos’ description of ‘Raum’ which he said can only be truly felt with the senses – that anything other than direct experience is representation, be that a drawing, a photograph, a text. Loos asked his students to visualise the spaces they wished to create, and afterwards to draw them, so that they originated in the mind.

Tschumi described architecture as ‘the meeting place between concept and the sensual experience of space’’.6 In this light we could imagine space as the reverse image of consciousness. Representation is a two-way process – on the one hand we mentally reconstruct the external world in our consciousness, and on the other we externalise our thoughts and ideas into the world through the act of representation.

The intermedia workshops offered students the chance to take hold of representation and discover its instrumentality in giving their ideas spatial reality. This gave them a way of seeing space as von Hildebrand7 described it: a postivity into which objects could be submerged – like a body of water.

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Text by Alice Clancy and James Rossa O’Hare

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Le Corbusier, ‘L’espace indicible,’ L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui. Special Edition, January 1946, pp. 9–10. Republished in English in: Le Corbusier.

New World of Space. Reynal and Hitchcock, 1948. Quotations here taken from Joan Ockman, ed., Architecture Culture 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology. Columbia Books of Architecture/Rizzoli, (1993)

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Tschumi, Bernard. Questions of Space: Lectures on Architecture.

AA Publishing, (1995)

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Von Hildebrand, Adolf. Das Problem der Form in der bildenen Kunst.

Intermedia Exhbition

Strasbough JHE Heitz, (1893)

Photo by Alice Clancy

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(following spread) Intermedia Exhbition opening Photo by Alice Clancy

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SENSATION

STUDIOS / MIDDLE SCHOOL / SEMESTER 1

The Space Between – Measured Surveys Chapelizod, County Dublin

Tutors Wendy Barrett Gerry Cahill Alice Clancy Will Dimond Kevin Donovan Eileen Fitzgerald Anne Gorman Fiona Hughes John Barry Lowe Stephen Mulhall Aoibheann Ní Mhearain Esmonde O’Briain John Parker Michael Pike Beth Shotton Peter Tansey

Students Reem Al-Sabah Jack Baker Franziska Bilger Eamon Bolger Aileen Boylan Phoebe Brady Cillian Briody Harry Browne Gareth Butler Domhnaill Byrne Natalie Byrne Lisa Callaghan John Campbell Rebecca Carrroll Sarah Carroll Meghan Carter Caryn Chan Mark Choi Thomas Conlon James Corboy Michael Corcoran Keith Cormack Eamonn Costello Alan Coughlan Kate Cregan Robert Curley Ben Dawson Beibhinn Delaney Christina Devereux Deirbhile Doddy Sarah Doheny Mark Doherty Alanah Doyle Jude Duffy

Eleanor Duignan Avril Dunne Kevin Egan Muireann Egan Aprar Elawad Marwa Elmubark Linda Fahy Rebecca Fallon Michael Farrell Oonagh Farrell Liam Farrelly Louise Finlayson Ellen Fitzgerald Shane Fitzsimons Andrew Flood Gemma Gallagher Rachel Gallagher Eoin Gillen Niamh Gilmore Marc Golden Donal Groarke Fiona Gueunet Fiona Harte Clive Hennessey Donn Holohan Rachel Hoolahan Andrew Howell Hannah Hughes Sean Hughes Naomi Hyland Greg Jackson Joanne Keenaghan Christina Kerr Stanislav Kravets

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Jill L’Estrange Sean Lynch Hugh McDermott Louise McGarrigle Alan Meredith Caitriona Moloney David Mulkeen Conor Murphy Michelle Murphy Gráinne Nic Gearailt John Nolan Ultan Ó Conchubhair David O’Mahony Muireann O’Sullivan Hana Potisk Linda Prendergast Laoise Quinn Nicky Rackard Robert Reid Hannah Scaife Fiona Shiels Clodagh Somers Jonathan Steen Mary Smith Cian Tarrant Ekaterina Tikhoniouk Alexandra Wallace Ailish Walker Keith Walsh Amy Widdis Simona Yonkova David Zhao Gerda Ziemele

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49 Detailed collective surveys were undertaken of Chapelizod Village and its environs, investigating and responding to the character of this most particular of places. Through observation, analysis, and representation an understanding was developed of this territory, its structure, character, history, and its relation to the city, adjacent suburbs and the landscape of the Phoenix Park.

Site surveys were carried out through various media, including photography, sketches, video, map investigation, and measurements recorded on site.

The information was compiled as both observation and reference, for use in a number of design projects later situated in the town.

Site within the greater Dublin urban context Collective drawing

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STUDIOS / MIDDLE SCHOOL / SEMESTER 1

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Neighbourhood sections Collective drawings

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53 REFLEC –TION

Upper Studio, Middle School Photo by Alice Clancy

REFLECTION

Ground

THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5

Tutors Mary Laheen Aoibheann Ní Mhearain Students Elizabeth Burns Katy Giblin Sorcha Kenneally Cillian Magee Méabh McCarthy

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UCD ARCHITECTURE YE ARBOOK 2011

A remark by geographer Frederick Aalen in Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape that in Ireland ‘pastoral proclivities may have retarded an early emergence of urban life, favouring instead the peripatetic and ephemeral urbanism of the fair’ led our studio to explore the existence and development of Irish fair greens. Initial research and fieldwork focused on their continuing role as the Ground of communal activity in emerging urban societies. This preliminary work resulted in the making of a catalogue of Irish fair greens and a study of the particular greens of the towns of County Meath: Navan; Trim; Kells and Athboy. Four students have chosen a site for their design project in relation to an existing green, while a fifth has proposed a green in a former urban and built space. All have been tackling issues of edge, level, emphemerality, permanence and the relationship between building, urban formations and landscape.

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The fair green of Kells, located on high ground and just outside the walls of the medieval town and Early Christian monastic centre, is currently used as park and car park. Elizabeth Burns, interested in looking closely at how people – particularly those (opposite)

on the margins of society – use buildings, has chosen to build

Counter

a community centre and library on the edge between town and

Elizabeth Burns

green, and thereby repair and strengthen that relationship.

REFLECTION

THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5

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Allotment Méabh McCarthy

With an interest in living in the city and the concept of urban agriculture Méabh McCarthy has chosen an inner city street, in half of which stills stands some of the finest houses of the georgian period, with the other half made up of failed social housing from the 1970s, soon to be demolished.

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Fair play Sorcha Kenneally

Fair hill in Cork city, a place replete with greens and fair activity, resting on a hill above the city is a large – one of the largest in Ireland – fair green. Sorcha Kenneally has chosen this place, a field now used as a playing pitch and surrounded by housing, in a relatively disadvantaged part of the city as a focus for a general architectural and landscape strategy about Irish fair greens.

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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5

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Katy Giblin explored the ‘porch field’ of Trim

Porchfield

Co. Meath, a large green area surrounded by

Katy Giblin

monuments of the medieval town, sloping down towards the river Boyne on its southern edge. While it is now much used as a park, for walking, fishing and field sports, a ring road for the town cuts it in half. At the intersection of that road and a medieval path Katy has proposed a discreet levelling of the ground to house new activities.

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The former fair green of Navan is now a carpark with occassional use as a market and although it is surrounded by public buildings fails to present itself as an urban space. Cillian Magee has chosen to repair the edge and modulate the contours and mend the tattered urban fabric by adding a new public building which is a courthouse.

Courtroom model Cillian Magee

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The Space Between – Library Design Chapelizod, County Dublin

“…the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.”—Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Whilst the village of Chapelizod has a certain cohesive quality by virtue of its geography and architecture, its public realm is under threat. Its public spaces are inadequate and choked by transport thoroughfares, and its buildings have suffered closure and dereliction with the loss of many businesses and institutions which once sustained the collective life of the community.

Recent developments have, in the main, not been sympathetic to the public realm, and the value of ‘the street’ as the arena for communal life has been eroded.

In this context designs were made for a Community Library in Chapelizod, to provide the village with a much-needed public building, a resource for the community and a facility accessible to all. The role of the library and what it might become for a small urban community was reconsidered, as a place of fulfilment, joy and refuge for young and old.

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Public space in context David Mulkeen

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62 (above) Model (opposite top) Perspective of public space (opposite bottom) Section through reading room Phoebe Brady

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(opposite top) Section through reading room (opposite bottom) Model (below) Public ground drawing Hannah Hughes

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(above) Section through hall (opposite top) Truss construction detail Caitriona Moloney

(opposite bottom) Contextual section Sean Lynch

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(left) Reading room section Ekaterina Tikhoniouk

(opposite bottom) Library interior study Rebecca Carroll

69 (below) Reading room from Lightroom workshop Andrew Howell

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ESSAY / BRIAN WARD

Through the City we Focus Civilization: CR Ashbee’s New Dublin

Axiom VII The new relationship of man to life which machine industry has brought with it, finds its fullest expression in the new life

Brian Ward

of our city. This implies that through the city and its proper adjustment to mechanical conditions will man realize again those finer values which the arts bring into life. Through the city we focus civilization.1

Ten axioms provide foundations for the arguments proposed in CR Ashbee’s 1917 publication, Where the Great City Stands. Only two mention the city itself. The book, Ashbee’s contribution to the town planning debates of the early 20th century, was by his own admission not a technical manual for putative town planners, but rather ‘an attempt to show what lies behind the City Life’.2 His focus was, as ever, on the challenges mechanisation posed to a social order which had, he contended, heretofore relied upon craft as a civilising force for the general population. Ashbee’s interest in the city lay less in the built environment as an artefact and more in its role as the arena in which these challenges could be seen with most clarity. His seventh axiom sees him attempting to assign this arena with a determining role in the creation of a new civilised alignment between man and the world around him.

The Dublin Town Planning Competition of 1914, in which Ashbee was awarded second place, was his first substantial foray into the new field of planning and the Irish capital features strongly in Where the Great City Stands.3 His experience in the Dublin competition was presumably influential in his thinking on the new discipline and the way in which it could be used to make the city a more effective ‘civilising’ device. This short essay concentrates solely on this element of Ashbee’s wide-ranging competition entry, The New Dublin, A Study in Civics which he submitted in the form of a 72-page hand-made book.4 It looks to its author’s thoughts about Dubliners as the key

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1

CR Ashbee, Where the Great City Stands, A Study in the New Civics, London: Essex House Press and BT Batsford, Ltd, (1917), p. 3

2

Ibid., p. 1

3

Dublin is third only to London and Chicago in the amount of references it attracts in the book.

4

Ashbee’s personal copy is now held in UCD Special collections.

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to understanding the document. In examining Ashbee’s attempt to use Dublin as a focussing device, it draws attention both to the role of the rural condition in his conception of the city as such a device, and also to the impact the city was to have on what he termed its ‘obverse’ – ‘the new life of the country, agricultural or suburban.’5 In his assessment of the relative merits of the city against the countryside, Ashbee held a more nuanced attitude than that commonly attributed to those involved in the Arts and Crafts movement.

He is, perhaps, best known as the architect and designer who, in the spring of 1902, led 150 workmen from East London to live in the small town of Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds. Explaining his reasons for moving the workshops of the Guild of Handicrafts, he exults in the ‘[r]epose, margin, leisure, reserve, restraint, and colour’ of the healthy life offered ‘in country surroundings where there are great fields, and trees and beauty’. In contrast, London is painted a place of ‘soot, ... oppressive ugliness, and [a] daily nervous racket of locomotion to and from work.’6 Such sentiments accord with the tenets of the Edwardian back-to-the-land movement that was at the height of its influence when Ashbee organised the exodus.

But in bringing the Guildsmen with him, Ashbee’s search for the ‘Simple Life’ differed profoundly from that of others such as Edward Carpenter, who retreated alone or with a partner to the countryside.

Ashbee moved with Londoners gathered around him. The countryside may have offered a more colourful physical environment than the East End, but he was often disappointed by the dullness of the rural dweller. In contrast, he delighted in the ‘vivacity’ of the ‘East London cockney’ and ‘his imaginative romance, his effervescent humour, his loyalty and affection.’7 After six years in the Cotswolds he noted that ‘the quality in [the

cockney] that is perpetually driving nervously for something new’ was missing from those he encountered in the countryside:8 Nothing so strikes the townsman when he settles in the country as the apparent unwillingness of people in the country to try any experiment themselves or allow others to try it. The townsman sees in their attitude a want of seriousness – an apathy.9

Ashbee’s move to the countryside followed a more formative earlier decision to move to Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel shortly after graduating from Cambridge. With the expansion of the franchise in the late 19th century there was a renewed interest in those of the lower classes to whom power was being passed. The residents of Whitechapel, sensationalised in the press, were cast as the harbingers of England’s future, symbolising either its descent into anarchy or its emergence as a more equitable and free society. The East End became a hotbed of social reforming activity, with emphasis very often placed on the teaching of its inhabitants in the hope that an educated ‘Industrial Democracy’ would exercise its vote in a responsible manner. The university settlement movement was part of this endeavour. Samuel Barnett’s pioneering Toynbee Hall, seeking to bring people of different classes together, provided a residence for graduates in which they could offer educational programmes to London’s poor.

The Guild of Handicrafts, training and employing the men of Whitechapel in traditional crafts, grew out of a reading group that Ashbee hosted in Toynbee Hall. It was a conscious attempt by a young Ethical Socialist to bring the writings of Ruskin, Morris and Carpenter to bear on English society.

Educating the proletariat in crafts was to cultivate a bottom-up social evolution which, replacing the factory system with an economy based around craft workshops, would lead to a reformation of England’s political structures. The broad hopes which Ashbee invested in the young men in his Guild can be seen in the deployment of an apprentice as a

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5

Ashbee, Where the Great City Stands, A Study in the New Civics, p. 3

6

CR Ashbee, Craftsmanship in Competitive Industry, Being a Record of the Workshops of the Guild of Handicraft, and Some Deductions from their Twenty-One Years’ Experience, Campden, Glos., and

7

London:Essex House Press, (1908), p. 44

8

Ibid.

Ibid.

9

Ibid., p. 49

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Postcard from Ashbee’s collection of postcards of Dublin

symbol of the emerging Industrial Democracy in his utopian fictions, From Whitechapel to Camelot and The Building of Thelema.

After his experience in the East End, the English city was envisioned by Ashbee to be a place of flux and city dwellers were seen to be forging a new social order. On the other hand, the English countryside became a place of inertia, its population trapped in the relationships of an inherited power structure. Within its stasis, though, it had preserved work patterns that offered mankind a richer interaction with the world than that presented by factory work. For Ashbee, agriculture was a repository of the deep knowledge countless generations had secured through working with physical materials in the natural environment.

Such knowledge could act as a necessary

counterweight to the nervous excitement of the new civilisation being formed within the cities and needed to be woven into the life of the emerging Industrial Democracy. Again, education was to be the means through which Ashbee proposed that this might be done: ‘We need teaching in agriculture as a branch of modern [industrial] life, ... as a ... factor in Western civilisation.’10 Ashbee’s thoughts on the relative merits of the English city and countryside provide an illuminating context for The New Dublin, A Study in Civics. The characterisations he had built up through his English experiences required partial revision for the Irish situation he confronted on his visits (in June 10 CR Ashbee, The Hamptonshire Experiment in Education, London: George Allen & Company Ltd., (1914), p. 76/7

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and August 1914) to Dublin in preparation for the competition proposal. His diary entries for these visits document his genuine interest in Irish affairs, particularly in how these affairs correlated with those of England. Home Rule, which was seemingly imminent on his first visit, is portrayed as ‘a social aspiration seeking embodiment’, a phraseology commonly used by Ethical Socialists to describe the New England towards which they were working.11 In Dublin, as in the East End, Ashbee hoped to witness the forging of a new social order in which power was shared more equally amongst the population.

Yet, he recognised that he was held at a remove from anyone who could be said to represent a new democratic Ireland. While in Dublin, he stayed in Rathgar with the Rt. Hon. Jonathan Hogg, a wealthy Unionist who, Ashbee observed, associated predominantly with people of a similar political persuasion. Servants were the only Home Rulers with whom Hogg and his companions came into contact. Yet they were aware that they lived amongst a population that desired and demanded Home Rule.12 Ashbee recorded their ‘puzzlement’ as to what kind of society would exist when their ‘flunkeys’ and that troubling population, ‘the thousands of idle unemployed that loaf and laugh in the Dublin streets’, gained power or, more pertinently, ‘decided to change places with their employers’.13 In such a situation, as Ashbee observed ‘[o] ne’s natural query is what is the measure of the flunkey’s genuineness?’14 The young Cambridge graduate had overcome his fear of the English proletariat through slumming expeditions into West Ham and Deptford and a period of residence in the East End. Ultimately he had found the cockney in whom he invested his hopes for England’s

democratic future. While in Dublin Ashbee walked the streets, OS map in hand, in order to familiarise himself with the city. Yet these ‘tramps’ do not seem to have brought him into contact with a Dublin version of the London cockney that would allow him to query the observations of his Rathgar dinner companions on the city’s population: ‘When I walk these Dublin streets I’m appalled at the immense idle population, wasting, drifting about, undisciplined.’ He turned to literature from the Celtic Revival in an attempt to transcend the scenes he witnessed. Walking through Patrick St, he recalled ‘The Heroes’ by AE (George Russell) in which an ‘Irish Christ’ teaches the protagonist of the poem to see ‘Beauty through [the] unrealities’ of a slum or ‘daffodils [shining] out where filth is splashing from the heel.’15 Alternatively, quoting The Playboy of the Western World, Ashbee justifies his guilty thought that the slum dwellers might be better off fighting in World War I – ‘it’s the will of God that all should rear up lengthy families for the nurture of the earth.’16 This lack of a lively Dublin cockney presented a particularly acute problem for Ashbee, the town planner. In his romantic socialist utopia, political structures would somehow emanate from the inner desires of the general populace, and so too would the built environment. ‘[T]he new democratic town plan’ was to be ‘the synthetic plan, the plan of the understanding of a people’s needs’.17 This obviously depended upon the involvement of the citizens. In the introduction to The New Dublin, he announced that:

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The new town plan of Dublin is too great and too fascinating to be handled by any one individual architect, nor should its carrying out be committed to other than Dublin men – or at least Irishmen. The builders

11 King’s College, Cambridge, PP/CRA/3/3, Ashbee Memoirs,

of a city should be the Citizens themselves...18

Cataclysm, (1914–1917), p. 48 12 ‘Bridget the charwoman came to Mr. Hogg’s housekeeper the other day exchanging political amenities: ‘You’ll all be forgetting’ she said ‘that I’ll not be coming to you any more when we get the Home Rule, for I’ll be driving about in me own car;’ and then she added with a

15 Ibid., p. 46

fine Celtic touch ‘not that I won’t be regretting it, for I’ve grown to be

16 Ibid., p. 60

very fond of ye.’ Ibid., p. 49

17 UCD Special Collections, 711.409415, CR Ashbee, The New Dublin,

13 Ibid., p. 48 14 Ibid.

A Study in Civics, (Unpublished manuscript, Sept 1914), p. 3 18 Ibid., p. un-numbered

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While in the conclusion the citizens are again reminded that no ‘noble conception’ of Dublin can be achieved unless they ‘take a broader view of their responsibilities’ and recognize the ‘duty’ they owe to their city in an ‘enlightened Democracy’.19 Ashbee’s notions about town planning required the existence of committed citizens, but in Dublin he found himself confronted with a lethargic populace.

The Irish capital had escaped the influence of the industrial revolution which had, in the English cities, unsettled man’s ‘relationship ... to life’ and created a citizenry ‘driving towards Social Democracy’.20 While Dublin’s built environment had therefore survived the 19th century largely unblemished by laissez faire planning, the shell of a beautiful medieval and 18th century aristocratic city now sheltered a population which had more in common with the English country dweller than his urban counterpart.21 Ashbee, having walked Dublin’s streets, described it as ‘a city under invasion ... by pauperized agriculturists making a somewhat pitiful encampment.’ The problem posed to the visiting architect like himself was to advise on how ‘the City [could] be saved from this destroying army.’22 His solution was to imagine a city which would draw upon the “‘Uhrdummheit’ of ancient agriculture, ... the well-springs of civilization” which existed within this army.23 Ashbee maintained that the ‘natural skill of the land’24 must be latent in Dublin’s unemployed population and if the city was

to recognise itself under Home Rule as the new capital of an agricultural nation, it would take a step towards solving its ‘peculiar problem.’25 As Ireland was ‘never likely to develop greatly as an industrial country,’ her capital could continue to shun the industrial revolution and instead organise itself as ‘a distributive centre for agricultural produce.’26 A city based around agriculture in this way would tap into Matthew Arnold’s ‘Celtic genius ... [for] personal crafts’27 and nurture a community of craft workers as: handicrafts ... dovetail into the agricultural life.

Such things are not primarily of the machine, or conditioned by ‘Times’ and ‘Speed’. They are the direct processes of human personal labour, they have to do with the land, the sun, the tides, the seasons.28

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Ashbee positions his town plan as a vehicle for the Celtic Revival and in turn positions that revival as a local renaissance dealing with universal forces.

In doing so he offers a plan seemingly emanating from regional conditions, but containing lessons for cities with different histories. Ireland’s capital would become a city in which ‘Agriculture [set] the limit’ on the impact mechanism was having on modern life.29 As such it would be a place in which unique solutions could be found to the problems facing mankind during the 20th Century: The Government of Ireland in the next 50 years will be greatly influenced if not dominated by the small farmer,

19 Ibid., p. 68

and it is not unlikely than an agricultural community

20 CR Ashbee, Craftsmanship in Competitive Industry, Being a Record

will find other ways out, for it has more to do than an

of the Workshops of the Guild of Handicraft, and Some Deductions

industrial community with the realities of life.30

from their Twenty-One Years’ Experience, p. 49 21 In fact, in the 1911 census Dubliners accounted for over 70% of the city’s overall population. Mary Daly records that rural migrants to Dublin tended to come from the prosperous countryside of Leinster and to have secured employment as shopkeepers, policemen,

Before this could be achieved, the problem, as Ashbee stated, was to get the citizens to ‘[follow] me in my dream of the Dublin to be’. 31 This involved somehow overcoming the wariness of the country

clergy, transport workers etc. Rural born labourers were more likely to emigrate and ‘do not appear to have settled long in the city’. Mary

25 Ibid., p. un-numbered

E Daly, Dublin, The Deposed Capital, A Social and Economic History

26 Ibid., p. 32

1860-1914, Cork: Cork University Press (1984), p. 140

27 Ibid., p. 39

22 UCD Special Collections, 711.409415, CR Ashbee, The New Dublin, A Study in Civics, (Unpublished manuscript, Sept 1914), p. 17

28 Ibid.

29 Ibid., p. 66

23 Ibid., p. 50

30 Ibid.

24 Ibid., p. 66

31 Ibid., p. 68

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dweller towards experiment, and tempering the ‘innate conservatism of the peasant’ with a ‘constructive enthusiasm.’32 In Dublin, this had to be done within an environment that had not yet experienced the shock of modern ‘mechanical conditions’. In proposing a resolution to the central quandary facing him, Ashbee drew attention to the impetus that the University Settlement movement provided to the early history of the town planning movement. The New Dublin sees him tracing a strand of thought that ran from the publication of The Bitter Cry of Outcast London through University Settlements, the Charles Booth survey, the saving of the Wren Churches, the new council housing schemes and the garden suburbs to end ultimately with the creation of ‘a new country life’.33 Ashbee suggests therefore, that in town planning, ‘the vitalizing force of the University must be kept clearly in view’ and Toynbee Hall is used as an example of the benefits that would accrue if this were to be done.34 While bringing the University’s force to the poor of Whitechapel, the Hall had also benefited those Oxford and Cambridge graduates moving to the slums in the hope that their presence would ‘better’ the inhabitants of the East End – in turn they had received ‘knowledge of the life of the poor’.35 One of their realisations was that the people with whom they worked in London had come from the countryside two generations previously. Somehow the hothouse of Toynbee Hall, bringing together the experiences of rich and poor and urban and rural, had endowed those involved in the enterprise with a complete picture of modern life that allowed them to imagine this ‘new country life’ which drew the best from both new and traditional practices.

Giving the settlement movement its due recognition in the genealogy of town planning allows Ashbee to suggest that the establishment of university settlements in the slums of ‘the most beautiful 18th century streets and houses’ would be the first step towards the creation of a populace capable of performing their democratic

duties through the creation of a new town plan.36 In Dublin the settlements would tailor themselves towards the teaching of agricultural science. Their inhabitants would then find that the way out of the slum lay through the new suburb to the revived country life of Ireland... If these slum dwellers were Irish peasants two generations ago, and the central idea of a Dublin university the application of science to agriculture, it is inevitable that the reaction of the university upon the slum must lead to the stimulating of an agricultural life that is to be.37

Intriguingly, Ashbee asserts that ‘on the way’ from slum to country life the citizens of Dublin ‘would, incidentally, achieve the Town Plan.’38 This was presumably to be facilitated by their realization that the civilised streets and squares of Georgian Dublin were a crystallisation of the rural life from which it had drawn its resources. 18th Century Dublin possessed, for Ashbee, a strong ‘sense of plan, which implies coordination and working together in a community.’39 The first lesson to be learnt when ‘the Irish universities ... neighbouriz[ed] some of the old Dublin streets’ was to be: ‘that the life behind was an agricultural life seeking expression’.40 The impetus that was to awaken the inhabitants of Dublin to democratic citizenship was ‘the application of science to agriculture’, the renewing of traditional practices through the appropriation of modern methods. Although it may have isolated him from Dublin’s Home Rulers, the Rathgar house in which Ashbee stayed while preparing his competition entry offered him exposure to one of the principal actors in the modernisation of Irish agriculture. Hogg introduced his guest to a close friend, AE (George Russell). Ashbee had been anxious to meet Russell as he was aware, through his writings, of the work that he and Sir

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36 Ibid.

37 Ibid., p. 57 38 Ibid.

32 Ibid., p. 66 33 Ibid., p. 56

39 King’s College, Cambridge, PP/CRA/3/3, Ashbee Memoirs, Cataclysm, (1914–1917), p. 55

34 Ibid., p. 55

40 UCD Special Collections, 711.409415, CR Ashbee, The New Dublin,

35 Ibid., p. 56

A Study in Civics, (Unpublished manuscript, Sept 1914), p. 57

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ESSAY / BRIAN WARD

Horace Plunkett had undertaken in the foundation of the Irish co-operative movement. This was an endeavour which Russell described as ‘an attempt to build up a new social order in Ireland.’41 In The New Dublin Ashbee records that England was learning much about agriculture from Plunkett, so he was also presumably cognisant of Plunkett’s pioneering work as First Minister in the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction.42 Plunkett defined his efforts in this capacity as ‘the application of science to the cultivation of the soil and the improvement of livestock’.43 In direct contrast to his reading of the modernisation of England, it was the rural landscape in Ireland that was the scene of the modern project for Ashbee. On his return to Dublin in 1916 for the exhibition of the Town Planning Competition in the Mansion House he made a clear distinction in his diary between an ‘Old Ireland’ and the ‘New Ireland’ that was emerging in the 20th century Irish countryside.44 The town plan Ashbee exhibited that November can be read as an attempt to bring to bear on the Irish capital the excitement of the rural renaissance that he perceived both in the Celtic Revival and the social reforming work of Russell and Plunkett. The symbiotic relationship between town and country that this would involve was summarised by Ashbee in Axiom X of Where the Great City Stands: ‘the reconstructed city cannot be stable without a corresponding reconstruction of the country. Town and country should be correlated and react upon one another.’45 If as Ashbee suggested, Dublin slums were to be transformed

into a university of agricultural science, the capital would become a worthy focussing device for the countryside being imagined in the pages of the nation’s writers.

It was, of course, not to be. In 1938, when Ashbee recalled his time in the city he drew attention to the elusiveness of both real and imaginary Dublins to an Englishman such as he. The Dublin he had sought was impossibly romantic, but his idealism had not previously thwarted his ability to find, within London’s urban culture, a vehicle for his Ethical Socialist dreams. It was to the cockney that Ashbee turned when drawing a line under his involvement with a city teetering beyond redemption.

As all we had been engaged upon turned out to be something half seen in the Celtic twilight, the redemption of this brokenhearted city could have come in no other way than by revolution. Nor has it come yet. The eternal Celtic wonder, the unexpected sudden shift in the twilight, forever baffles the Englishman. It may be better to stand as he, foursquare – and, while laughing with the Irishman, remain a Cockney Romanticist.46

(opposite) End of year show

41 George W. Russell (AE), Cooperation and Nationality, A Guide for

Photo by Alice Clancy

Rural Reformers from This to the Next Generation, Baltimore: Norman, Remington & Company, (1913), p. 48 42 In 1916 after reading AE’s The National Being. Ashbee records in his diary that ‘Rural Ireland indeed is a sort of magic mirror for what England may become.’ King’s College, Cambridge, PP/CRA/3/3, Ashbee Memoirs, Cataclysm, (1914–1917), p. 380 43 Sir Horace Plunkett, Ireland in the New Century, London: John Murray, (1904), p. 265/6 44 King’s College, Cambridge, PP/CRA/3/3, Ashbee Memoirs, Cataclysm, (1914–1917), p. 380 45 CR Ashbee, Where the Great City Stands, A Study in the New Civics, p. 4

46 King’s College, Cambridge, PP/CRA/3/3, Ashbee Memoirs, Cataclysm, (1914–1917), p. 383

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STUDIOS / UPPER SCHOOL / SEMESTER 1

Square

Tutors Mary Laheen Alan Mee Jenny O’Leary Marcus Donaghy Students Timothy Brick Emma Byrne Signe Carlsen Rachel Carmody Lisa Cassidy Alexander Crean Andras Dankhazi Andrea Doyle Rachel Dudley Leonie Fitzgerald Denis Forrest Ciara Grace Kate Griffin Eoin Horner Alison Hyland Raphael Keane Damien King Zoé Laebens Cillian Magee Aonghus McDonnell Contributors & Visitors Denis Byrne Finola O’Kane Merlo Kelly Philip Nolan Ali Grehan Hugh Campbell Michael Pike

Patrick McGlade Steven McNamara Barbara McShane Sorcha Murphy Enda Naughton Aisling Ní Dhonnchú Donncha O’Brien Luke O’Callaghan Bláthmhac Ó Muirí Aisling O’Sullivan Patrick Phelan Orla Phillips Hugh Queenan Patrick Roche Christine Sassel Deirdre Spring Patrick Stack Adrian Sweeney David Walsh Jamie Young

The project began with an intention to ground the work in an explorative and creative mode, centred on the urban area of Mountjoy Square and surroundings. It is an area that includes important historical urban pieces, some beautiful eighteenthcentury houses, as well derelict spaces, abandoned ground and leftover – or left-behind pieces of city.

Many historical facts, documentary evidence, and guidance from our colleagues in the Conservation Programme, were available to us – tutors and students – but there were also many unknowns.

The project began in research, at the desk and in the field, in order to create a picutre of the current state of the square against the background of its history over two centuries.

Resource

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The initial research was guided by the notion of ‘resource’, and students explored what the resources are that underpin the pluri-dimensional and multi-layered phenomenom that we call ‘city’.

Some of these, important though they are, inhabit the subterranean city world, yet without them the city would not exist, or would not exist in that place. And therefore, investigating a city or part of a city involves the unravelling of the various layers of geology, topography, geography, political history, and the social patterns, both historical and present. Likewise, those who live now in and around the square give meaning and life to the urban fabric, and their presence is a resource to the city. Students engaged in a productive discourse with residents – particularly The Mountjoy Square Society – planners, architects who live and work in the community such as Denis Byrne and Nuada Mac Eoin, and pieced together an understanding about how life goes on there today.

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79 Exchange

Mountjoy Square historic model Photo by Stephen Tierney

Informed by and grounded in their research, students began to design based on the idea of ‘exchange’ both at the scale of the city and the scale of the building.

Thoughts about ‘garden market’ and the possibility of urban agriculture were also part of the rubric. The idea that architecture might facilitate the making of a community was a theme that emerged from students’ explorations. Some sought out the derelict lanes and lost spaces beyond the square as possible loci for renewal and creativity.

In conclusion we felt that we had touched the tip of a very interesting iceberg that could be a rich resource for future study.

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STUDIOS / UPPER SCHOOL / SEMESTER 1

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81

(above) Terrace and graft (opposite) Coalface Deirdre Spring

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STUDIOS / UPPER SCHOOL / SEMESTER 1

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(above) Linking Bath Lane to Mountjoy Square (opposite) Sectional perspective Hugh Queenan

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Measure

THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5

Tutors Tiago Faria Stephan Mulhall Students Alex Crean Stephen McNamara Patrick Phelan David Walsh Jamie Young

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(Get the) Measure was the proposed territory of this thesis group following on from the previous year’s work. It is a process-based, non-prescriptive theme, intent on enabling students to explore a personal interest. The adopted work method engaged in a search for parameters, in order to facilitate the emergence of questions, which in turn helped in the formulation of a problem. Throughout the process students were encouraged to simultaneously layer the work process at different scales.

The outcome of individual investigation converged on a common interest in cycles.

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(opposite) Meath Street Market & Studios

Alex Crean examined the nature of craft and how we relate to the things we use, with a particular interest in how they are made and consumed.

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Section through Dublin’s Great South Wall Patrick Phelan

Research that Patrick Phelan conducted on weathering led him to explore the shifting equilibrium between man and nature.

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Sectional model Stephen MacNamara

Stephen MacNamara was interested in spaces for healing and his work explored questions emerging from the cycle of life and death.

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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5

A measure of Dublin’s morphology David Walsh

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Jamie Young wanted to work with the

(opposite)

reclamation of ‘lost spaces in the city’

Vacancy map

and tapped into economic cycles.

Jamie Young

David Walsh’s interest is in movement and ‘Deviational Spaces’ and focused on the historical layering in the city.

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EVENT / IN CONVERSATION / DAVID CHIPPERFIELD & JOHN TUOMEY

Lunchtime conversation with David Chipperfield Red Room, Richview 12th November 2010 Transcribed by Elizabeth Burns

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David Chipperfield Photo by Alice Clancy

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EVENT / IN CONVERSATION / DAVID CHIPPERFIELD & JOHN TUOMEY

John Tuomey [moving some students’ models along the window seat]: Since these plaster casts are here, maybe it would be interesting to begin by talking about material.

physics, climate; they involve aesthetics, what buildings look like, and design. I suppose ‘design’ is the sexy thing and we’re all really excited about making forms and inventing. But what we do is only given significance by the decisions that uphold those ideas. There is a danger at the moment that we are so influenced by the virtual, that we become detached from the real and from things which give meaning to the real. We can’t avoid the fact that imagery is so powerful, and I’m not just talking about our ability generate images, but even the way by which we can summon up images very quickly. We become trained to flick through television channels and within a microsecond we think we know what’s going on based on a small amount of information. That’s becoming the problem generally, a real problem since qualities of architecture rely on other judgements.

Talking about materiality we’re more than likely to talk about physicality. I’m often asked about detailing and materials, and clearly it’s something I’m interested in, but to be honest I’m not that interested in it as a detached thing. What’s fascinating about architecture is that you have to materialise ideas.

To be honest, we all tell stories, we invent our own narratives to justify the conclusions that we come to. I go back to what I said at the beginning, you need to develop the rigour to examine your own story, to ask yourself why this stack of ideas has concluded in that particular arrangement. The quality of your work depends on your ability to examine the basis of that story and the rigour not to fool yourself or invent fragile stories.

[laughing] David Chipperfield: Well yes, thank you John. I have been dropped into it, and I’m not quite sure what I have on my mind at the moment. First of all, I think it’s a great opportunity to visit the School to meet the students. I admire the spirit within which John is trying to make things happen and conversations happen. Because I think that conversation in architecture is critical and you’ll find that once you get out of college trying to maintain that dialogue is really difficult. It becomes in a way a secret agenda you have to pursue because the profession tends to take you away from it. And especially in Anglo-Saxon cultures, to discuss ideas is somehow suspicious. Clients are very nervous of discussion of things which don’t immediately relate to time and money and maybe functionality. And of course architecture is made out of more things than that. While you’re at college it’s really important to develop a way of talking about architecture and a way of critiquing architecture. You might rely on your professors to tell you whether you’re making mistakes or not, but while you’re here you should be developing that faculty yourself because once you get out of here there’s no one to tell you what to do apart from yourself. The ability to self criticise is part of becoming an architect. It’s a very confusing time in architecture and especially now when we have this financial crisis I suppose it’s even more confusing. I don’t think you should be daunted by that because recessions come and go and in my experience, moments of energetic construction tend to squash atmosphere, debate and dialogue. And on the contrary, maybe these times of less activity give us the opportunity to put back priorities. In the field of architecture and building culture priorities have been rather confused. What we have to do as students is to establish priorities and judgements because in the end design is about judgements that are felt. In our craft, the skills that we have involve material,

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JT: Sometimes in our discussions in the school we might put the cart before the horse if we think the idea precedes the work; that in order to do some work you have to have a concept and that you better wait until the concept is delivered to you. But in a classical definition of concept, is something that is developed through work, your lecture last night showed that the deeper you go in, the further the concept is confirmed.

So when I asked you about material I meant the material out of which work is made.

UCD ARCHITECTURE YE ARBOOK 2011

JT: And how do you think about scale?

DC: I think you’re right. There aren’t abstract concepts in architecture, the ideas for architecture are within architecture itself, they don’t float around somewhere…

JT: You don’t see architecture as a nebulous thing; it’s anchored to the reality of rooms, of windows, of doors.

DC: We’re now discussing where the architectural ideas come from. Where do you start, when you’re scratching around, you know, what are you looking for and where are you going to find those thoughts? There are architects who have become very influential; form making is a fairly autonomous process. They have developed sort of hand writing, a self referential form-making that has its own energy. I’m not saying it’s all negative, Gehry is like some sort of otter; he just keeps making things.

He’s so used to making these autonomous objects; which he will say each time are very much based on the programme, on the location, on the climate, but strangely all look roughly the same. In some ways he’s not lying because what he does is completely pliable and he’s incredibly skilful at getting all that other stuff out of the way. There’s a critique that is thrown at Gehry that he’s not particularly interested in buildings and actually he is. It doesn’t really affect him in the same way, because if you need to change the building, if the third floor needs to be slightly bigger and the fourth floor needs to be slightly smaller, then he just uses his form making skills to reassemble the parts. If you have a more rational approach to architecture you go into crisis as soon as one part of the building has to become bigger, and the whole project has to go back to square one. So Gehry is actually very skilled.

DC: Well, I think the skills are different. I mean there’s no doubt I’ve done some furniture but I’m not a furniture designer. Our generation, we were children of recessionary times. I came out of architecture school and into early practice with very low expectations about what one could build.

For the first 10 years you did shops and things.

And actually, it wasn’t so bad. What was interesting about doing small projects was that you very quickly learned the effect of things. In large scale projects the distance we have to travel from the first ideas to the realised building is enormous. In general terms it’s 3 years; I mean a building of any size is 3 to 5 years, even a house is 3 years. During that 3 to 5 year process you’ve not only got to keep convincing yourself ,and examining your own decisions, but every time you look over your shoulder there’s a whole load of other people that you’ve got to keep in line. We’ve had to persuade people from the very beginning what something might be like in 5 years time. In that process of persuasion you don’t have much convincing evidence because you don’t have the real thing. You can’t go into a room and say ‘here’s the blue one and here’s the yellow one, isn’t the yellow nicer? I mean it’s clear isn’t it?’

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JT: Speaking about one part being bigger, one thing you’ve been doing in your career is shifting scale quite a lot. You would design a cup and a saucer, you would design a couch, you would design quite a large part of the German cultural cluster, you would design a house.

DC: But I think you’ve got to go back to the essential things each time.

JT: In your world, how much of that process is a secret? How much do you talk about that with people?

DC: You mean how subversive is our job?

JT: Yeah.

DC: That’s a very good point because I think that shows the depth of our weakness. One tactic is subversion, so you don’t tell anybody what you’re doing or you tell them as little as possible; this was Jim Stirling’s great thing. ‘Don’t explain anything to the client, just tell them where the door is, where the bathrooms are, you come in here.’ This is the problem, we’ve been brought up with this idea that dialogue is not only difficult it’s nearly fatal, because as soon as you open it up you’re starting to bring clients into discussions which

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you’re best to hide. I think that’s why the high-tech bunch were so successful, because if you can turn a building into a structure then all of a sudden it’s a sort of a hedgehog, you can’t touch it any more. Nick Grimshaw could say ‘because of the span the beam has to be like this and you’ve got the ducts here…’ and if the client asks, ‘can’t you make this…’, ‘no, no because that’s got to span from here to here’; so everything’s deterministic. The buildings that got planning permission in London against all odds were sort of high-tech buildings; like Nick Grimshaw’s Waitrose in Camden town, it’s weird. And at the same time if you tried to build a modest contextual brick building the planners would have forced you to go pastiche Georgian.

But if you propose a high-tech hedgehog and the planners ask ‘why does it look like that?’, ‘well because of the span here and these two things have to hold the trusses down, and bring the forces over the roof…’ You’ve either got to take it or not.

Those things become tactical. I think this is really central, and it’s very dangerous. I mean one has to be strategic, but the difficulty is you end up trying to develop two stories, your own and the one you talk about publicly. It’s difficult enough to develop your own ideas. In my experience if your ideas are well founded and relevant and purposeful, then you have a chance of persuading people. Knowing that you’re going to be challenged so hard on these things, you’ve got 2 ways; either you’re subversive and you try and describe things in one way and do them in another or you run head on. Maybe I’m an optimist, but I would say that if you believe in things strongly enough… We are in a world where there’s so little done through conviction, if you have well grounded conviction, not just conviction of wilfulness and formalism and pique, but you’ve got ideas about architecture that can resonate beyond form making. In my experience if your ideas are robust enough then you have a very good chance of getting people to support them.

have been lost. In other words that through the process of a hard life what remains is the essence of what was intended and the rest is extra.

DC: Exactly that. Because that’s what he was doing throughout his life and finally at the end you have these wonderful pieces. It’s as if he’s found the form inside the stone and there is this incredible relationship between the material itself and the form that he’s trying to find and there are no superfluous floppy bits. And I’ve often said that to my students, imagine the wind blows very hard through your project, blows off all the bits you don’t need. One is looking for something that is not constructed in a fragile way. If architectural ideas are built, one on top of each other, then you’ve got to make sure that those ideas are substantial and robust enough to kick them around. In the end a project’s not dependent on one thing or another. Sometimes we have to pretend it is, to keep the intensity. You have to realise an idea with a certain intensity and therefore details matter and the way that it’s built absolutely matters. I think we are in sort of a crisis about substance in architecture. Substance of idea and substance of matter. Architecture has always depended on a notion of permanence and we are not quite so sure any more in our modern times. My children tell me to change my telephone after six months.

They say ‘you’re still using that telephone, it’s out of date’. Technology is changing so fast, we throw things away so fast, we consume things so fast.

Everything seems to be ephemeral and there’s a tendency to think that architecture is a part of this transient attitude, therefore you feel really old fashioned talking about permanent values because it seems to be in conflict with the prevailing mood.

But the reality is, if you see any building and the excavation and the foundation works of any building however temporary it pertains to be, we’re still digging big holes in the ground and pumping mud out and concrete in. It’s an illusion that things are less permanent. We are in an intellectual climate that is confused about the status of values, and that has an obvious influence on the way that we prioritise decisions in architecture.

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JT: Last night you cited Michelangelo’s test of a good sculpture, roll it down a mountain and at the bottom nothing of any significance will

UCD ARCHITECTURE YE ARBOOK 2011

JT: You were touching just a little earlier on resonance of architecture as opposed to the flourish of design; that architects themselves must believe in something more than their own contribution to architecture. Last night I described you as ‘attending to the culture’ of architecture. Can you say something about literacy or belief in, that wider sense of architecture, as opposed to ‘my architecture’?

DC: The modern movement was founded on the premise that form was generated by function and this became its mantra. There was a revolution in architecture in the beginning of the 20th century where architects tried to sever themselves off from the battle of styles. After the First World War, this great tragedy, we were going into the future and architecture had to reflect that spirit.

It substantially broke with history and only looked forward and came up with in a way some of the most beautiful poems of architecture; early Corbusian villas, wonderful projects in the early modern movement. This radical position produced extraordinary buildings that were desperate to demonstrate their disconnection from history. Flat roofs and horizontal windows and buildings that stood on columns; if buildings always have pitched roofs, lets not have pitched roofs, if buildings always have vertical windows lets have horizontal ones, if buildings stood on the ground lets stand them in the air. Let’s do everything that disconnects us from that. Then I think there was a period… (well, I’m not going to give the whole history of modern architecture!).

When I came out of school, through early years of practice, working with other architects, it was shocking to me how hated modernism was, but modern architecture especially. Prince Charles weighed in and gave validity to the taxi driver’s view of modern architecture, and to be honest he wasn’t completely wrong. In the late 70s early 80s, around most English towns and every new building was crap. So you couldn’t really blame people for disliking architecture and I found that really shocking. In a way that’s where the subterfuge comes from; this idea that one is so disconnected from the culture that you are operating within, and

that for me was really sobering. I discovered that to bridge the dialogue you had to find things that people would understand. The first building that I did was the Rowing Museum in Henley. It had two pitched roofs and was clad in wood and in a way it was quite conservative but I realised that there was no other way of having a dialogue; I mean there would have been riots in the streets if I had tried to put a radical alien object there. It seemed to me that architects might make some gesture towards sentiment and towards things we’ve always regarded as being somehow thin and superficial.

Obviously they’re not because they’re deeply held; maybe more emotional than intellectual, but still…

JT: …so it’s a lot to do with continuity.

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DC: yes, and it was really interesting that as soon as I did a building that seemed to perform a double role as a piece of modern architecture and one that people in the area sort of liked. And it was a sort of shock you know; this piece of modern architecture.

I realised through this dialogue that I didn’t have to talk about window frame details or things like that; I just had to talk about intent and idea. As our ability to control the public realm seems to get less and less you can still find ideas in projects that locate the buildings not just in terms of their typology and construction but also in some sort of social way.

JT: So now I want to invite… questions from this crowded and patient audience, especially from students.

Q. Do you think that architects have disconnected themselves with the social realm and that for example if we go towards designing a theatre, we should speak to musicians? The Independent Group, the Smithsons didn’t know how to bring modernism forward in the UK so they sat down with artists. Should we introduce that dialogue into the institution of architecture?

DC: I think we have to use our naivety… I just read your interview with Frampton; he quotes Siza as saying that ‘we’re specialists at non-specialisation’.

The privilege of being an architect is that you’re

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dropped into worlds that you know nothing about.

I worked on a Dolce and Gabbana centre; I had no real passionate interest in frocks… but once you start understanding what they need and what the issues are, it’s quite interesting. You have to peel back to see what the problem is and what the purpose is. Functionality is somehow a dead end, the function of a living room or a bathroom, or a shop; that doesn’t actually tell you much, but purpose is another thing, what are you trying to do and what the essential issues are. That’s what’s quite nice about the tasks that we are given; at one time it’s a university, another it’s a fashion company, another time it’s a vineyard, another time it’s a museum, and you can’t be an expert in that, but you can be an unfolder of issues. That’s the task of the architect in terms of their dialogue, that we have to unfold and give oxygen to issues that might be important. The funny thing is, that in my experience that when you go to meetings the clients want to talk about architecture and you want to talk about what they do. They say ‘right, where are all the drawings’ and you say ‘well first of all we’d like to talk about how do you work’.

Certainly that’s something we do in our office a lot, I always describe it as putting everything on the lawn. You go to an organisation and you don’t take their description of themselves for granted, you actually test very naively, why do you do this, why do you do that. You actually start to understand what priorities are and you can start building up a case which becomes part of the dialogue.

DC: Yeah, at that point your dead, there’s no script.

I always say to my teams you can’t put a plaque up on the outside of the building saying ‘we had a really bad time; they didn’t have enough money, the window contractor let us down, so please when you come into this building be aware’. You can’t do that; whatever is built is the story, whatever ideas are visible to, and perceivable and manifest are the ideas. Anything that’s not manifest and is not perceivable is pointless. You know, I was in Libeskind’s Jewish museum in Berlin and guys came round ‘well the architect intended… you now, you may wonder why there are so many crosses, well apparently what the architect meant by this was…’ Someone is trying to explain the complex narrative of this building. Well at that point I think it’s pointless. If it’s not something that you feel, then it’s not an idea. But I think we’re talking about something else, which is the articulation of the idea in the formulation of the building.

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JT: helpful answer.

Q. Do you think dialogue, outside of the dialogue from the architect and client, should be done by buildings or by the architect?

Should the buildings be communicating…

DC: you’re talking about when the building’s done?

Q: yes

Q: I wonder in your own work, when it comes to the line between when you’re making form, or an organisation. How do you make that judgement? Where does the form begin and where does your organisational idea take hold?

DC: I think you’re looking for a magic moment in design. It’s when the thing starts to take on its own life and you tend to take a more guardian role over it. It starts to walk. And then its a matter of pointing it in the right direction.

Until that point it’s always frustrating because you never quite know what the thing wants to be and gradually it starts to become…

And I find that the really interesting moment, you can sense that it’s established a series of ideas which are conspiring together in a good way and then it’s a matter of not screwing it up. You’re checking it against how this animal wants to behave or could behave. I can’t explain how you get to that point because that’s a very accidental and messy process. Designing is incredibly messy and I think one has to be braced for that and enjoy that. It’s very difficult in one’s office to make sure that people don’t lose their nerve.

Because I find it very dangerous to jump on to

UCD ARCHITECTURE YE ARBOOK 2011

formal solutions too early. We’re desperate to find a form and then get on with it. And it’s the same in an office; It’s terrible in an office because you’ve got 8 kids all desperately waiting to know what this thing’s going to look like because then they can really get on and start designing. So there’s a tendency always to grab something at the first opportunity. What we have to learn is to exist in this slightly foggy moment without losing nerve.

Because I think if you jump too quickly, you may not have created the right series of ideas.

Q: Do you think the intellectual justification of the story sometimes gets in the way of the physicality of architecture?

DC: Yeah, I do. I think the story has to be robust and you’ve got to be able to explain it to your mother (JT: her mother’s probably an architect or a philosopher). On the basis that her mother is not a philosopher or an architect; I think that is the test. The thing that I enjoyed in Berlin, perversely, in a sort of masochistic way, I had to explain the project to everybody; to politicians, to people that hated me for what I was doing, to conversationalists, to project manager and continuously having to order the project through description. And that description had to be pretty straightforward, it couldn’t be we’re doing this and then we’re doing that; It had to keep coming back to very clear and consensually understood notions Germany is a probably bit more patient for concepts and ideas than the Anglo-Saxon countries.

material that is spatial, its atmospheric, we can control where light comes in; think about how many artists are trying to move in to confiscate those qualities, for themselves. They’re bored with working on a flat surface put onto a wall. They’re making flooded rooms with oil… and moving art into a much more physical thing. How disappointing is it that many modern buildings have no physical qualities. I’m not talking about architecture by good architects; I’m just talking about the world within which we live. There is a focus on architecture as a style thing, we focus more and more on single buildings and the state of architecture has become measured by Zaha’s latest building, or Norman Foster’s latest building or whatever. In the meantime, the general environment is left alone.

When I was a student there was an idea about cities, but now it’s just objects. It’s as if we’ve given up. In England architects don’t do housing hardly at all. Most good architects are not doing office buildings. London has changed enormously in the last fifteen years with not much improvement at urban or infrastructural level. It hasn’t been a golden period for London architecture. Georgian London left an incredible contribution not just to singular buildings but to the assembly of spaces and the idea of what a city is. I think that’s the point that concerns me. There are singular buildings that engage architecture’s potential, but how depressing it is that 90% of building production doesn’t come anywhere near it. It’s the fault of part of the profession, it’s also the fault of the planning process, it doesn’t encourage; it discourages. It’s the fault of clients that don’t have the patience to be good clients. And clearly example is the best thing. There’s no better thing for architects to produce good buildings and there are enough architects producing good buildings to at least keep the flag flying. There are good architects all over the world, what’s really rare is good clients.

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Q: You talked last night about the capacity of architecture to give you goosebumps.

I wonder would you talk about a piece of architecture that gives you goosebumps? And maybe, if there’s time, something outside of architecture that gives you goosebumps.

DC: Well, the second part, sailing with my children is always my great relaxation. I don’t know, in architecture there are lots of buildings that one enjoys, where one really witnesses the authority of architecture. It is disappointing how few modern buildings do that to you. We are operating with

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STUDIOS / UPPER SCHOOL / SEMESTER 1

Room to Manouevre Dublin City

98 Tutors Orla Murphy Deirdre McKenna Emmett Scanlon

Students Aisling Aherne Elizabeth Burns Niall Carroll Claire Chawke Ciaran Conlon Brendan Dalton Megan Etherton Sean Finegan Michael Fingleton Padraig Flynn Emilie Folkersen Edin Gicevic David Hannon Samuel Kane Helen Karrenberg Ronan Kenny

Caroline Kiernan Sara Madigan Brian Massey Suzanne Maverley Claire McMenamin Scott Morton Maria Mulcahy Niamh Murphy Kieran Murray Sarah Prendergast Ekaterina Samodurova Sean Schoales Enida Skalonjic Robert Tobin Robin Trieschmann Su Wang

UCD ARCHITECTURE YE ARBOOK 2011

99 The group sought to explore the possible strategies for an urban society that emerge from the interior, by mapping and making designs for the internal life of Dublin city. Through a programme of spaces for ceremonies of Civil Marriage and Civil Partnership, it was hoped to encourage the city to make more rooms for more kinds of people, rooms to accommodate citizens as they play out the ordinary and extraordinary dramas of their daily lives. By doing so, the group proposed that citizens would be offered the opportunity to more easily and effectively engage with the city, and by extension, with each other. The rooms sought to imbue their users with a new sense of purpose, a new sense of commitment and citizenship. They aimed to be memorable, emotional and affecting.

Working immediately at a large scale, students began internal, spatial and material investigations to understand the scale of the individual rooms, the relationship from one room to another, vertical and horizontal circulation, stairs, doors, windows, structure and light.

Monday Market, structured peer-to-peer reviews Photo by Philip McGlade

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STUDIOS / UPPER SCHOOL / SEMESTER 1

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Waiting room Su Wang

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STUDIOS / UPPER SCHOOL / SEMESTER 1

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(left) View from stairwell (opposite top) Ground floor plan Edin Gicevic

(right) Interior views of Large Registry Chamber Sam Kane

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DESIGN TECHNOLOGIES / MIDDLE SCHOOL / SEMESTERS 1 & 2

Design Technologies: Material Observation

The project sought specifically to build up knowledge of the existing structures and materials, both recent and historic, that have been used in the construction of the buildings, streetscape and landscape of Chapelizod village. Observations and measurements were recorded through scaled sketches, annotated with dimensions and notes.

Tutors Vivienne Brophy Anne Gorman

104 The core principle of the Y2 Architectural Technology

The focus in the first semester is the development of

programme is to develop in the student an understanding

a facade as a threshold between external space in the

that building materialisation is a integral part of the

landscape/urban setting and a significant internal space

design process and that there should be no conflict,

in the design studio project. The second semester focuses

rather it should enhance, the achievement of the delight

on the creation of good quality indoor space and the

of architecture.

impact which the design and construction of the building

Optimised performance and environmental quality

envelope as a climate mediator has on the thermal,

of a building is based on passive design principles but

visual and acoustical environment of internal space in

achieved through the development of the form, envelope

the design studio project. The integration of innovative

and systems of a building. An emphasis is placed

components and technologies are investigated to improve

upon developing building envelope solutions through

building performance, internal environment and reduce

an understanding of the principles of sustainable

environmental impact.

construction and the application of appropriate strategies to create spaces of environmental quality while achieving architectural design intent.

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Early stage environmental analysis Caryn Chan

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Archive

Tutors Peter Cody Chris Boyle Students Ciaran Conlon Joseph Flood Conor Morrissey Kieran Murray Cian Scanlon

THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5

An archive for Neapolitan Mimmo Jodice, an exponent of contemporary Italian art, working primarily in the medium of photography. His important life’s work comprises the three areas of production, exhibition and archive. The archive has become so large as to require a building to house the photographs of his artistic production.

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UCD ARCHITECTURE YE ARBOOK 2011

Ciaran Conlon finds Naples is a city immersed in past connections. Finding it strange to think of an archive, housing the work of Mimmo Jodice, as somewhere that is discrete or hidden away from view, his thesis seeks exposure, at a small scale focusing on elements that draw our attention and forge memories of a place and at a large scale that uncover long term collective memory, accumulated over time, to derive strategies for continuity within Naples.

(opposite) Section in context (right) Window study Ciaran Conlon

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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5

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(left) Overdrawn sketches and photos Joseph Flood

Joseph Flood is interested in temporality and flexibility in architecture. The contrast is explored between those things that remain constant within architecture, such as the typology and organizing structure of the courtyard plan with the ever changing layering of surface and lining that emerges with frequent changes of use. He proposes to rehabilitate an existing building that lies in ruins and provide additional accommodation within a newly built element. The goal is to cater for the present needs of Fondazione Jodice while also facilitating future programmes and functions.

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Cian Scanlon’s thesis is concerned with exploiting the experiential qualities of density. The site for the archive is a void within the dense fabric of a Greco/Roman insula, opening onto a secluded public space to create a building that interacts with the fabric of its surroundings, while remaining open to the sky. The building is composed of three interdependent elements, modulated (above top)

by the existing on-site walls and gardens.

Conceptual drawing – layers of space

Moments of intensity are contrasted with

(above)

moments of release allowing a journey,

Concept collage – from intensity to release

through the Foundation, to culminate in

Cian Scanlon

expansive views over the bay of Naples.

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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5

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Conor Morrissey affirms the archive as a repository of knowledge that seeks to engage with the layers of the city, a palimpsest, built up over time. The experience of the city is not only grounded in everyday reality but also in an individual and collective memory forged from the past. The thesis explores the potential for the relationship between the layered structure of the city and the life’s work of the photographer Mimmo Jodice, to structure the archive as an organizing element of the new Foundation in order to transcend the immediacy of the present.

UCD ARCHITECTURE YE ARBOOK 2011

Kieran Murray has being studying the constant found in all Architecture the idea of threshold; a moment that delineates the inside from outside.

Situated between the Ospedale Degli Incurabili from the 16th century, an active monastery and a university is the proposed archive for the Neapolitan photographer, Mimmo Jodice. He intends to use an investigation of threshold to repair the fragmented urban landscape through a contracted series of thresholds and transition spaces in order to enrich the experience of users and create a stronger bond between the building and its physical context.

(opposite top) Theatre buried in the City (opoosite bottom) Layers of experience Conor Morrissey

(right) Axo Kieran Murray

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EXHIBITION / SEMESTER 1

Opening Shot Photography Competition and Exhibition 15th–20th October 2010

Beginning with Wim Wender’s premise that ‘every photo is the first frame of a movie’, a competition was held for photographs taken during Open House Dublin, 7th–10th October 2010. Judged by Stephen Tierney and James Rossa O’Hare, the submissions were exhibited in the Front Room at Richview.

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Winning images were submitted by Hugh Queenan, in the category ‘Timing’, Stephen Murray, in the category ‘Framing’, and Enda Naughton, in the category ‘Atmosphere’.

The Custom House as seen from the interior of Busáras Photo by Stephen Murray

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STUDIOS / UPPER SCHOOL / SEMESTER 1

Seaside Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin

Tutors Tiago Faria Sheila O’Donnell Oran O’Siochain Students Brian Barber Jarlath Cantwell Peter Cosgrave Valerie Dabadie Raymond Dinh Michael Doherty Katy Giblin Freya Fisher Joseph Flood Aideen Hannon Eva-Lena Hanses Lisa Halton James Hayes Hyung Joon Kim Fergal Joyce Sorcha Kenneally Angelica Kerama Méabh McCarthy Patrick McGrath Padraig McMorrow Conor Morrissey Timothy Murphy Stephen Murray Áine Nic an Ríogh Banbha Nic Canna Fiona Nulty Aoife O’Leary Conor Rochford Cian Scanlon Ruth Stewart Albert Tobin

One of the city of Dublin’s defining characteristics is its location on the sea, with opportunities to access the coast within the greater city area on both North and South sides. Dun Laoghaire has been a popular resort since the first railway line in Ireland connected it to the city centre in 1834 and it continues to be a favoured destination for people from all over the city.

The group considered the shared public face of this coastline, its social role as a place of leisure, fun, solace, solitude and escape. Suggesting that Dublin’s coastline has the same status as Dublin’s main street – in that it belongs to the whole city – the project touched on local issues and challenges, focusing on the role of the seaside in the city.

Students were asked to make architectural interventions in this landscape which would enhance the citizen’s enjoyment of and access to the sea, thus reinforcing the role of Dublin’s seaside in contributing to our sense of ‘society’.

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(above) Section through from market to bathing place Conor Rochford

(opposite) Site strategy model Conor Rochford

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Plan and perspective of Forty Foot bathing place Brian Barber

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Section through bathing and community rooms Brian Barber

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Courtlife

THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5

Tutors Michael Pike Simon Walker Students Ciara Grace Patrick McGrath Claire McMenamin Luke O’Callaghan Orla Philips Enida Skalonjic

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Courtyards are an ancient spatial configuration, occurring in distinctive form in many regions of the world. This generic type of planning has retained its relevance by offering the possibility of dense urbanization and the maximum use of land, at the same time as ensuring a direct contact with the two natural elements – earth beneath and sky above.

The work of the group has focused on the search for new urban forms based on the courtyard within the Liberties. These are deliberate counter-points to the omnipresent free-standing apartment blocks and narrow house plots that define the area. Through the use of an alternation of covered rooms and rooms open to the sky, the students were asked to explore alternative settlements that can be conceived as porous solids rather than compositions of individual blocks, allowing for deeper and more elaborate plan forms.

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Claire McMenamin has been looking at the city as theatre and is working between Cork Street and Newmarket. Her project combines housing Site model

and a courtyard theatre and is concerned with

Claire McMenamin

the layering of public and private space.

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Courtyard plan Orla Phillips

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121 Axonometric of units with site plan Enida Skalonjic

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(left) Concept sketch Luke O’Callaghan

(below) Site plan Patrick McGrath

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Flat section/Court elevation Ciara Grace

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EVENT / CONFERENCE / FINOLA O’KANE

Portrait of the City Finola O’Kane

Conference Programme Thursday, 9 December 2010

Friday, 10 December 2010

Official opening of conference by Minister of State Martin

Session 4: The City in History

Mansergh & Principal Investigator, Finola O’Kane Crimmins

Dell Upton, The Political Iconography of Sacred Ground: History and Development in Birmingham’s Civil Rights District

Session 1: Picturing Cities

Conor Lucey, (Un)realizing urban scenography in early modern

Stephen Daniels, Mapping the modern city: JMW

Dublin: architectural discourse and building praxis

Turner and the art of urban topography

Naomi Miller, Jerusalem: The Ultimate Pilgrimage City

Nicholas Allen, At the Edge of the City

Keith Morgan, The Suburb in the City: The Boston/

Francis Dodsworth, Shaping the City. The culture

Brookline Contest in Defining the Urban Landscape

of improvement in 18th Century England Martha MacNamara, Re-figuring Urban Space: Race and Ethnicity in Printed Views of New England, 1800–1850

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Session 5: City Limits Jacinta Prunty, Ways of ‘Seeing’ the Town: The Tradition of Morphological Analysis as Applied to Dublin City

Session 2: The Identity of Cities Annmarie Adams & Shelley Hornstein, An Incomplete

Joanna Brúck & Andrew Tierney, Landscapes of desire: parks, colonialism and identity in Victorian and Edwardian Ireland

Portrait: Demolition as Urban Amnesia

Samantha Martin-McAuliffe, A Topography of

Jeffrey Gurock, Forest Hills, Queens, NY, 1920–1970:

Sustenance: The Iveagh Markets

Creating and Maintaining an Urban Space

John Montague, Democracy and Idealism in 17th-century and 18th-

Joseph Nugent, Ulyssesean Architecture. The

century city maps: some London and Dublin maps considered

space of the page and the space of the city Ellen Skerett, Recreating Chicago: From Francis

Session 6: The Significance of Cities

O’Neill to Mayor Richard M. Daley

Jukka Johkilehto, The Significance of Cities: Current Developments and Concepts

Session 3: Cities of Memory

Florian Kossak & Stephen Walker, Chapter One … No, let me start again

M. Christine Boyer, Portrait of a City: The Many Maps of Baghdad

Joana Cunha Leal, Post 1755 Lisbon: Two and a half portraits

Chad Bryant, City of Memories: Nineteenth-

Finola O’Kane, The Portrait of the City

Century Topographies of Prague Jeffrey Cohen, A Streetscape named Desire: Long Views through the Emerging Bourgeois City Sean Connolly, Like an Old Cathedral City: Queen Victoria in Belfast, August 1849

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The conference ‘Portrait of the City; Framing the Significance of Historic Urban Landscape’ took place in Dublin Castle during a fortunate hiatus in Ireland’s long winter of 2010. As a key historic landscape for the geography of Dublin city, and more broadly, Ireland, the Castle proved to be an inspirational setting for the conference’s concerns. Dublin, capital of England’s old-world colony, has had to re-evaluate her landscape many times. As cities paradoxically begin to frame themselves as urban landscapes they attempt to reposition the urban centre and its perceived attractions. The use of the word landscape acknowledges the role of a topographical way of seeing, a culturally-configured nature, and related ‘landscape’ paradigms in the history of ideas to advance a portrait of the city which tries to frame not only the physical place of the city, but also the cultural, historic, artistic and intellectual ‘landscape’ that the city itself redraws over and over again. This landscape of ideas, by which all cities mould and project themselves, is the frame within which the portrait of the city is placed.

Cities have always engaged in presenting themselves artfully to outsiders. Sometimes the presentation takes place at the bounds of the city itself, dividing suburban from urban space, countryside from centre. Cities also position themselves through their relationship with other cities, as nodes in a network, specifically adopting an industrial, leisure or mercantile cast in order to distinguish themselves from their neighbours, superiors or competitors. Capital colonial cities have particular tensions, as the intellectual and subversive potential of the metropolis is undermined by the need to uphold the status quo.

Traditionally cities have been made by those in power; kings, aristocrats, politicians, developers.

They have seen fit to stretch axes, erase boundaries, expand territory and found communities. Cities are sometimes regarded as unsuitable environments for minorities, women and children, lending their portrayal a masculine cast, and creating chosen spaces for some, prohibited spaces for others. The capital offense, or the degree to which a city aspires to capital rather than regional identity, may alter and fracture over time. By redefining themselves spatially with infrastructural novelties such as

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Portrait of the City Illustration by Crimmins Visual Communications

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EVENT / CONFERENCE / FINOLA O’KANE

canals and motorways, cities remake their lines and limits. Such apparatus needs to be attractive, and where cities have left too many outside the pale, their raison d’étre is undermined.

Ireland, an ‘old-world colony’ of England, has had to recalculate her distance and position many times. The understanding courted by Ireland’s early tourist literature, unlike that of England, was not that of the native but that of the well-heeled foreigner, and the perspective addressed, that of arrival by boat into Dublin harbour. Ireland’s ruling ascendancy, having perceived the improving potential and economic advantage of tourism, became increasingly concerned with the ‘face of the country’, and the portrait Ireland painted overseas.

Setting out consciously to address the perspective of the visitor, and not that of the native, Ireland found herself the early focus of the traveller’s gaze, and this oblique and slanted view from the mainland transformed the image and reality of city and landscape.

The conference and its published proceedings form a key element in the joint UCD-OPW ‘Framework for Cultural Significance’ project at the School of Architecture, Landscape and Civil Engineering, UCD. This project sets out to explore the significance of the built and designed environment with reference to international benchmarks such as World Heritage Criteria. Aims and objectives of the research include:

and philosophy. Insight is also sought into the manner in which political and social factors influence cultural value in both the national and international contexts. Dublin, as the second city of the British empire, and one of the ten largest cities in Europe in 1800, is a significant city with outstanding universal value. This can be analysed and addressed in many ways; the Georgian estate structure and its colonial/absentee character, the very early development of a tourist industry and Dublin’s role in refining the traveller’s gaze; the overlapping visual and literary imaginations that created eighteenth-century space and its landscape of ideas; the formation of a nation state through the development of cultural institutions, cultural revivals and political revolutions and a literature which sustained, reflected and created all of the above.

To date the project has focussed on areas of Dublin that have an identifiable and notable historic significance. We have sought to determine not only the nature of this significance but also how it has changed over time and how it could be affected either positively or negatively by future development. This has taken the form of historical, urban and spatial analyses of selected areas of Dublin city such as the Leinster House Block Urban Study, the Dublin Castle Urban Study and the North Georgian City Urban Study. Other theses and studies are evaluating the impact of nationalism on the interpretation of cultural heritage in twentiethcentury Ireland, a comparative study of Georgian cities, the significance of Georgian suburbia, and the interlocking frames of city and country employed during the formation of this nation. In light of Dublin’s sustained contribution to world literature the project is also studying the manner in which architecture, landscape and literature work together to heighten and particularise the experience of cities. The supports the ongoing survey and analysis of Dublin city by interrogating the frameworks of cultural significance used to assess historic urban landscapes.

The ‘Portrait of the City’ conference was intended to inform this larger research project by broadening the frame of reference to include other cities and the manner in which both the city and its heritage

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• Cultural significance in the Irish context with particular emphasis on architectural and literary significance; • Evaluation of cultural significance in the context of World Heritage criteria; • Historical, urban and spatial analysis of selected areas of Dublin city; and • Analyses of the effects of globalisation on conservation philosophy/heritage.

The research also addresses concepts such as authenticity and integrity and their translation into conservation policy and practice in Ireland. It is intended to make a contribution to enhancing the understanding of universal values and how they affect contemporary conservation practice

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are framed for the public, the nation and the tourist.

Both project and conference support Dublin’s inscription as a world heritage site by exploring the significance of historic urban landscape to the individual, the nation and the international community. Both also support the National Inventory’s commencing survey of Dublin city by analysing the frameworks of cultural significance used to assess historic urban landscapes. The conference encouraged the exchange of knowledge and experience between international experts and Irish colleagues that will advance conservation and urban design theory and practice in Ireland.

For these reasons the OPW were joined in their support of this conference by Dublin City Council and the Department of Environment, Heritage and Local Government, also members of the Steering Committee for the Framework for Cultural Significance research project.

The Framework of Significance theme of the OPW-UCD project was also that of the conference; we set out to evaluate the frameworks we use to assess and compare cities, whether temporal, spatial, interdisciplinary or discipline-specific. Thus the strength and weakness of the conference lay in its interdisciplinary reach. We were fortunate that most, if not all, of the papers engaged with the positioning of cities within wider compositional frameworks (be they national, British, architectural, geographical or international. As we discovered in Baghdad, development can be conveniently framed as restoration by self-appointed liberators. In the celebratory new capitalism of the eighteenthcentury, improvement philosophy ensured that the practice of building in and of itself improved society, a philosophy wholeheartedly espoused by Irish developers in recent decades. Yet development, as the dissection of a small Turner oil painting demonstrated, may stand on very uncertain ground, and multiple points of view may undermine the great axes of planning and large-scale architecture.

The great grid of Chicago sits strangely with its ‘Urbs in Horto’ motto yet by zooming in on the manner in which religion, in its buildings and practices, acted as a confident frame for community life, we began to assess the community impact of a predictable grid. In the nineteenth century Belfast

reframed itself as ‘an old cathedral city’ and became the Liverpool or Manchester of Ireland.

The suburbs of New York broke and remade the frame several times, oscillating suburban to urban identity when the residents so desired. Olmstead’s gradual metamorphosis from landscape designer to urban designer posed questions of the wisdom of disciplinary limits and boundaries. Birmingham, Alabama’s sidewalks became cityscapes as the plan slowly exposed the underbelly of its political planning. Thus the conference in turn created a framework of significanc; points of reference in a grid of urbanity. Using different cities as case studies, the published proceedings will explore how and why cities diverge and deviate from one another, while at other times preferring to realign.

From Prague’s streetscapes to Dublin’s Iveagh Markets and from London’s malls and squares to the boulevards of Paris, the proceedings will examine key episodes in the history of cities, in many cases drawing upon visual and documentary sources that are to date unexplored.

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Peer-to-peer reviews Photo by Stephen Tierney

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129 COMBINA –TION

COMBINATION

DESIGN TECHNOLOGIES / UPPER SCHOOL / SEMESTERS 1 & 2

Design Technologies: Innovation, Integration & Performance

Concrete Studies Research into concrete mixes, relative to intended performance attributes and environmental profiles formed the base objective for this project.

A follow-up to the studies undertaken in 2009 on concrete assemblies and thermal performance, the primary objective was not a study specifically linked to thermal or U-Value performance, but rather to experiment with concrete mixes relative to a particular performance objective, which each group researched and established independently.

The intention was to maximize performance while minimizing material use, embodied energy content and the impact of CO2 emissions.

Tutors Elizabeth Shotton Tiago Faria

130 Group design work Photo by Jonathan Janssens

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Design Technologies: Special Topics

Option 1: Irish Timber and Sustainability The research interests underlying Irish Timber and Sustainability relate to the current imperative of establishing more sustainable building practices within Ireland and an interest in timber construction to achieve this goal. Research objectives are to establish a coherent body of information for reference regarding all aspects of local timber management and use within the Irish construction industry and a database of investigative and/ or innovative uses of timber in architecture, which could inform local practice. This year’s design build project investigated the re-use of salvage timber at the scale of 1:1 through innovative or investigative building projects.

Option 2: Parametric Design The research interests underlying the option in Parametric Design relate to the link between drawing media, design and fabrication. ‘Generative Components’ was used as the base 3D parametric design software in these studies, which involved establishing design parameters, developing a small project based on these parameters, and fabricating the object using CNC equipment.

Tutors Joseph Swan Fiona Hughes

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Tutors Elizabeth Shotton Tiago Faria

Site visit, Irish Timber and Sustainability Photo by Jennifer O’Donnell

COMBINATION

The Expanded Field Kevin Donovan

ESSAY / KEVIN DONOVAN

Art and architecture books may often sit on adjacent shelves, though they tend not to mix. For many masters of the Renaissance, knowledge of working in stone encouraged rather than precluded participation in both sculpture and building.

This artistic fluidity was largely disrupted in the seventeenth century which saw a progressive but marked categorisation of individual disciplines within the European academies. The advent of the Gesamtkunstwerk in the late 19th century served somewhat to bridge the resulting gap; originally referring to the unification of art through the theatre, the term was quickly adopted by architecture to represent the design of the totality of a building.

Though this might seem initially to claim the work of design for architects alone, this kind of thinking was fundamental to the inception of the Bauhaus where students were taught in many arts, and building, seen as the culmination of these arts, was always the work of many hands.

In its pre-war iterations, the Bauhaus existed outside the academy. This stands in contrast to our own School, established 100 years ago within a university that, for its founder at least, was to be ‘a place of concourse, whither students come from every quarter for every kind of knowledge’.1 Traditionally, ‘every kind of knowledge’ has cheerfully included the theory and history but not the training and practice of art which, until the late 20th century, has mostly operated outside universities.

The assertion of the art studio’s validity as a site for research is recent. The architecture studio has, on the other hand, fared differently; though too impure to fit neatly into the trivium or quadrivium, architectural education has long found a home in technical universities, its allegiance directed towards engineering and the sciences rather than the arts.

In this context, the signature of an academic alliance between the National College of Art and Design and University College Dublin last year promises much. In very general terms, the proposed inclusion within the University of a school promoting practice as research

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1

John Cardinal Henry Newman, What is a University? in ‘The Idea of a University’ (Dublin, 1884), sourced in Essays, English and American, with introductions notes and illustrations (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1910), Harvard Classics No.XXVIII

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echoes a global shift in academia towards the acceptance of new paradigms and methodologies that broaden its scope of investigation. This benefit accrues from the addition of a new discipline to the existing ones in the University as a whole. Rich as this is, the possibilities arising from supported integration of the discourses and practices current within both the architecture and art schools are, I think, even richer.

In a period when, for political and economic reasons, the pursuit of traditional architectural practice is challenged, the opportunity to broaden modes of practice by questioning their terms seems timely. These modes might, for example, draw on shared terms such as ‘site’ or ‘place’, issues explored in the land art of the 1970s,2 or even address fixed ideas about ‘space’, a term with which young architects become so comfortable as to be unsettled on learning that its place in our discipline’s vocabulary is relatively new and that other disciplines have an equal attachment to it. Echoing the proposals of theorists such as Lefebvre and de Certeau, the spatial practice of many contemporary artists explores means of engagement that should resonate with ideas for architectural intervention.3 The premise and effect of insertions, montages, performances, walks, collages, interventions, recordings, projections and other propositions have disrupted traditional expectations of artistic activity within the built environment in a way which is still relatively underexplored in architecture.

The theme of social responsibility in architecture is such a commonplace as to be difficult to question, bearing as it does a weight that derives from a requirement to provide places that facilitate by means of function. Because this need is very basic and real, it has tended to overshadow other social functions of architecture that seem less imperative. In art, this obligation does not exist per se, so art theory has problematised, developed and

discussed a case for social engagement. This type of thinking, derived partly from the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, provides alternative ways of reconceptualising existing political, economic, intellectual and social structures and, in the case of much contemporary art practice, provokes changes in our constructed views of the world.4 Such critical thinking has inflected the practice of many art forms (literature, music etc.) to the point where criticism itself is sometimes offered as a spatial practice.5 Its influence on architecture is, though existing, less salient. Thus, Rosalyn Deutsche’s thesis on the requirement to accept conflict in the public realm as a prerequisite for its existence and growth has become a point of reference for the practice of public art.6 This exchange, however provocative for the practice of public architecture, has had little impact on the practice of architecture where the question should be central.

The academic association of architecture with engineering rather than the arts has been formative.

Links between these disciplines are often forged across the problem-solving aspects of design, technological innovation and, in terms of research funding, projected economic value. It seems that in such a model, there is a pressure on research to clarify its eventual application even before it has begun. The matter of how architecture feels or seems, however, is much more fundamental than this and is difficult to express in the established vocabulary of science and technology. It is often discussed in architecture schools as ‘judgement’ or ‘language’, terms which are rarely explained, difficult to understand but widely used. In the arts, both liberal and fine, such questions of seeming, feeling, even beauty are considered important and are discussed as ‘aesthetics’, a term which has none of the weakness it seems to have conventionally acquired in architecture. By allowing ‘aesthetic’ to

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4 2

The work of Robert Smithson, for example, who collaborated with

Frankfurt Institute for Social Research such as Horkheimer,

TAMS architects on the design for Dallas Fort Worth Airport, is entirely bound up with these issues.

3

Adorno, Marcuse and Benjamin.

5

For example, Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans.

Steve Rendall, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, (1984) or Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Oxford: Blackwell, (1991).

The Frankfurt School refers to thinkers associated with the

This proposition is made by Rendell in Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between, London: I.B. Tauris, (2006)

6

See Rosalyn Deutsche, ‘Agoraphobia’ in Evictions, Art and Spatial Politics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, (1996)

COMBINATION

ESSAY / KEVIN DONOVAN

loosely connote ‘add-on’, ‘making-it-look-a-certainway’ or other such common simplifications, we are complicit in the reduction of architecture to problemsolving technology which should not take five years, never mind a lifetime, to learn. If, on the other hand, the term is used to mean ‘critical reflection on culture, art and nature’,7 our association with a college that unashamedly recognises the place of aesthetics in the world and its value to design practice is surely promising.

With the exchange of modes of thinking between disciplines, comes the obligation to question their relative processes. Though process may be essential to the artist, the critical theorist and the architect, it is unlikely that it will be the same for each practitioner.

In forthcoming collaborations, we can look forward to students challenging each other’s orthodoxy and, hopefully, the construction of what Kristeva has called ‘the diagonal axis’, a hard won path through the necessary resistance of disciplinarity and specialism. Initiatives have already begun.

A number of our 4th year students are currently exploring collective practice with a cohort from the Art in the Contemporary World masters group, NCAD. Supported by readings, presentations by practitioners and discussion of models from both the art and architectural traditions, they are conducting field work, and will propose and document interventions to a site in Dublin. There are plans to exhibit the results in an art space this summer.

These students meet every week in Newman House, a venue offered for the purposes of collaboration by UCD. This was the site of the Catholic University of Ireland, the predecessor of UCD, and is named for its previously mentioned founder, whose dictum was ‘to live is to change’.8 It is to be hoped that the opportunity to think collectively across two disciplines afforded by this academic alliance will provoke change and allow the production of a kind work which is impossible outside of collaborative practice.

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7

8

As defined in Michael Kelly (Editor in Chief), Encyclopaedia of

(opposite)

Aesthetics, New York, Oxford: OUP, (1998), p. ix.

Strategies from

from John Cardinal Henry Newman, The Development of Christian

an Urban Society

Doctrine, Oxford, (1878), p. 40

Photo by Ronan Kenny

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COMBINATION

THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5

Ecology

Tutors Marcus Donaghy James Rossa O’Hare Students Brian Barber David Hannon Padraig McMorrow Maria Mulcahy Eóin Murphy

We propose to cast projections back and forth, as to the past, present and possible future life of the (un)made spaces of the Liberties. Many of these spaces are threadbare and partially erased or obscured within the fabric of the city but these undead spaces endure in myth as part of the identity of this neighbourhood.

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Brian Barber A city’s development is initially determined by topography. Ground today is the stratification of structures utilising these now hidden resources. The surface level is the point at which past and present coincide. It is at this point I place the brief of the Dublin Civic Trust, on a site off Little Ship Street.

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Model Brian Barber

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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5

138 (above) Single room library (right) Concept model of ideal library David Hannon

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139 Blackpitts section Maria Mulcahy

Maria Mulcahy Making a respone to the social and physical topography of the liberties by rehabilitating a forgotten site in the Blackpitts. The programme seeks to marry a dual desire of urban renewal while making a space in the city which offers sanctuary to those in society in need of retreat and respite.

David Hannon The project, a community library in the Liberties, seeks to investigate modules and networks in architecture and city. The building connects to these extended urban networks through siting and by creating a library experience that combines learning, gardens and city.

COMBINATION

THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5

Padraig McMorrow

(above)

Through analysis of networks and flows across the city,

Perspective vathouse no. 7

interconnected ‘living-spaces’ are created.

(opposite)

An architectural scaffolding is woven into the existing urban fabric, adapting to the context of Thomas Street’s linear plots, allowing occupation and appropriation across this urban type.

The robust forms of the Guinness brewery inform the scale and mass of the Metro Inter-connector, a station which is integrated into flexible networks of the city, giving an intensity of occupation where collaborative systems for movement, dwelling, working and leisure emerge.

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Thomas Street Interconnector Padraig McMorrow

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141 E贸in Murphy Informed by the elevated topography of the site and the unique character of the study area, this thesis proposes a new city block mediating between the square at Newmarket and the Coombe bye-pass, accommodating

Newmarket

community, casual trade, and light industry.

E贸in Murphy

COMBINATION

WORKSHOP / UPPER SCHOOL / SEMESTER 1

Walking Drawing Making Memory David Lilburn

Working with the artist David Lilburn, the group recorded personal response and observation in drawings and words by making ‘Walking Sketchbooks’. Each individual produced a personal survey, recording the character, mood and texture of the Dun Laoghaire coastline between the East Pier and the Forty Foot bathing place.

“Walking drawing, for me, is a way of expressing a relationship with the landscape, an intense cognitive and physical involvement with the terrain… making them is a way of connecting with the event, a way of constructing and preserving memory – and memory is precious.”

—David Lilburn, Walking Drawing Making Memory: A Ballynahinch sketchbook. (Dublin: Occasional Press, 2009)

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Artist David Lilburn leading walking sketchbook at Forty Foot Photo by Sheila O’Donnell

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143

Sketches David Lilburn

COMBINATION

THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5

Asylum The Hospital and the City

Michael Doherty Institutional city – The Mater Hospital and Mountjoy prison constitute institutional voids in the stratum of Dublin city. Through a reconsideration

Tutors John Parker Hugh Campbell Students Lisa Cassidy Michael Doherty Paddy Roche Sean Schoales Ruth Stewart

of the Victorian prison and hospital typologies, a contemporary institution weaves into the vacated Mountjoy site, inverting the urban impasse into a mesh

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of institutional, public space in the city.

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This group took as its starting point the current project for a National Children’s Hospital next to the Mater Hospital in Dublin. The group explored the nature and potential of the relationship of a large institution to its urban surroundings, initially through study of the historical development of the hospital type and its theoretical underpinnings, and then through a series of design studies encompassing the scale of the city, of the organisation and of the individual space. Central to many of these investigations has been a critique of the current nature of healthcare provision. And common to all has been an emphasis on reconciling the inherent tension within the asylum: the need to withdraw and the desire to remain connected . Can the hospital retain its autonomy while remaining central to the life of the city?

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Mesh Michael Doherty

COMBINATION

THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5

Concept model Sean Schoales

146

Paddy Roche A Hospital with a graduation of external courtyards of unique character wrapped around a central circulation core creating different relationships with city while integrating wellness factors that maintain promote health and create positive distractions.

Ruth Stewart In order to reimagine the traditional notion of institution, the grain of an urban Georgian block, already occupied by medical functions is the proposed site for a childrens’s hospital. The house and its gardens to are used to mediate between the domestic and insititutional scales and design an environment of health and wellIn re-thinking the hospital, Sean

being in the city centre.

Schoales’s project tries to reconnect the hospital, which has become isolated

Using the confines of the proposed

from the city, back into the urban fabric,

site for the National Children’s Hospital,

reinstating it as an important public

Lisa Cassidy investigates how the dense,

building. The hospital engages with the

tall form required to accommodate the

latent public spaces of the surrounding

complex brief can engage with the city as

area. The building is permeable at the scale

a landmark public building while providing

of the city yet provides asylum for the child

Circulation study

clear navigation and a bright, stimulating

at the domestic scale.

Paddy Roche

environment to the patients and staff.

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147 Functional relationships Lisa Cassidy

Sectional isometric Ruth Stewart

COMBINATION

EVENT / LECTURE SERIES / SEMESTER 2

’Scapes Wednesday Lunchtime Lecture Series

The aim of this weekly seminar series was to generate awareness and discussion about the range of research work currently taking place in architecture and related areas of the university.

Organised by Niamh Marnham and Elizabeth McNicholas, the seminars took the format of a 20-minute presentation, followed by discussion.

Lectures

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19th January 2011

6th April 2011

Michael Pike

Merlo Kelly

Scale and Identity in the Housing

Luke Gardiner and the Gardiner Estate

Projects of Coderch

– Conserving an Urban Morphology

26th January 2011

13th April 2011

Hugh Campbell & Alice Clancy

Finola O’Kane Crimmins

Adventures in the Ambient Optic Array

Subversive Suburbia; Landscape and Revolution in Ireland 1798–1916

16th February 2011 Elizabeth McNicholas

20th April 2011

History of Landscape and ideas of water

John Tuomey

from Prehistory to Early Modern Period

Reading the Plan

2nd March 2011

5th May 2011

Alan Mee

Federico Scoponi

Specificity and Place

The Marginal Place

23rd March 2011

11th May 2011

Sandra Conroy

Niamh NicGhabhann & Caroline McGee

To See and Not See

Reconstructions of the Gothic Past Project

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149

Specificity and Place Alan Mee

COMBINATION

WORKSHOP / UPPER SCHOOL / SEMESTER 1

Room Journeys Performing a Space in Dublin City Workshop by visual artist Rhona Byrne

An urban place is one in which the collective lives of many combine to make a whole, and students aimed to explore how the consequences of such urbanity are also apparent in the design, construction, assembly and occupation of a room. Working in groups, a number of internal rooms in Dublin city were mapped, each with a strong material, architectural, social or cultural character and significance.

Rooms: The National Library of Ireland: Staircase and toilets 1 Upper Gardiner Street: Zen Room The Natural Cut: Salon Busáras: Rooftop Canteen The Stag’s Head: Saloon Bar Gate Theatre: Green Room Royal Irish Academy: Library The Shelbourne Hotel: Constitution Room Poolbeg Lighthouse: Lighthouse Room

(right) Room Journeys performance Photo by Rhona Byrne

(opposite) Elevation of Stag’s Head Group drawing

The workshop ‘Room Journeys’ invited students to engage in a deep listening exercise to develop strategies for detecting the difference between sounds, recognizing patterns, and giving meaning to what is heard in a given space. By closely exploring the sensory stimuli that exists and presents itself in a room, and how a room can act as an acoustic filter, we set about playing with how these sounds could be otherwise experienced and presented as vocal soundscapes. Taking nine very different types of rooms around Dublin city and considering the rooms as a sonic journey, an acoustic survey was carried out that mapped out the sonic properties of each space. These maps were then collectively made into drawings that describe these soundscapes as graphic scores. The graphic scores annotate a type of phonetic transcription to articulate these varied acoustic environments. Each group then formed a choir to perform their vocal soundscapes. This was then filmed as a way to explore the social processes of our interaction with the built environment – an ongoing exploration within my art practice.

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—Rhona Byrne

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COMBINATION

WORKSHOP / UPPER SCHOOL / SEMESTER 1

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Section through staircase of National Library Group drawing

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Structure and skin of Poolbeg Lighthouse lens Group drawing

COMBINATION

Into Practice

Session 1 Victoria Kavanagh / Gerry Cahill

Session 2 Alice Clancy / Cian McLoughlin

Session 3 Alyson Cummins / Conor & David

Session 4 Sarah Cremin / Cian Deegan

Session 5 Sheila O’Donnell / Niall McLaughlin

EVENT / LECTURE SERIES / SEMESTER 2

In his essay ‘Practice vs. Project’, Stan Allen describes the temporal dimension of practice, how it constantly unfolds in time and moves in multiple and undisciplined trajectories, in response to the ‘landscape of contingency’ (Allen 2009: xii) in which it operates. He states that ‘architecture is of necessity a discipline of circumstance and situation’ (2009: xi) and that ‘the practice of architecture tends to be messy and inconsistent precisely because it has to negotiate a reality that is itself messy and inconsistent’ (2009: xi).

This understanding of practice as necessarily flexible and dynamic is often at odds with a more academic and theoretical view that endeavours to unify architecture and give it a kind of grand narrative. Allen describes how ‘in order to legitimate its mechanical procedures, practice appeals to a project: an overarching theoretical construct, defined from someplace other than the studio or the building site, and expressed in a medium other than buildings and drawings’ (2009: xii) The school of architecture, rooted in the making of projects, tends constantly towards the latter understanding rather than the former.

Following on from the ‘Into Architecture’ and ‘Into Landscape’ series held in 2009 and 2010 ‘Into Practice’ was a lecture series given by a range of practitioners from within and outside of the School of Architecture. The intention was to broaden the discussion within the school and to connect with the work that is being carried out in architectural practice and associated disciplines.

Each speaker was asked to present a short lecture (15–20 minutes) to the students and staff of the School on a particular project or piece of work that they had recently made. Two short lectures were presented on each evening to allow a conversation to develop. The work selected was intended to give an insight into the work methods and processes of the lecturer, rather than emphasising the product.

In this way the everyday work of the practitioners could be presented and discussed.

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References Allen, S., Practice: Architecture Technique + Representation, London: Routledge, (2009)

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Untitled Cian McLoughlin

COMBINATION

New Ground

Tutors Peter Tansey John McLaughlin Students Aideen Hannon Deirdre Spring Patrick Stack Sarah Prendergast Donncha O’Brien

THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5

Over the last 50 years architects have been re-evaluating Modernism and have attempted to mitigate the destabilising effects of Modernity on society and our environment. We sympathise with this, however we believe that huge positive changes have occurred over the last century which have been omitted from architectural culture. The exhilarating aspects of modernity, evident in every aspect of modern life, we see as fertile, if unstable, ground on which to base our appreciation of the Modern.

Through a series of conversations around a selection of texts relating to our modern social and cultural condition, the direction of the group evolved collectively into an interest in difference within society as a catalyst of city life. This occurred as a response to forgotten groups within the city, and to the deficit in collective public space in the vast new suburb that is the lived urban condition for many people.

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Docklands mixed use

Aideen Hannon

sketch elevations

Inspired by stacking and overlap in cities like

Aideen Hannon

Manhattan and buildings like the Fiat Lingotto factory in Milan, Aideen’s thesis addresses programmatic juxtaposition. Taking the Dublin docklands as a natural home for large scale mixed-use, she develops an open framework for occupation for workshops and offices.

COMBINATION

THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5

158 (above) Civic Park site sections Sarah Prendergast

(right) Homeless facilities, Richmond Street, site model Deirdre Spring

Deirdre Spring On two derelict plots on Richmond Street in Portobello, Deirdre houses homeless families and individuals and provides counselling facilities.

The accommodation moves from institutional to domestic. The plans anchor the programme into the site and the occupiers into the buildings, a first step towards dwelling.

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Sarah Prendergast The project addresses the deficit of public space in the dormitory estates of West Dublin/ Blanchardstown. A long ribbon of left-over space offers a location for developing the public realm and to provide for the needs for a changing and mixed community.

The project expands from the formal civic space into the softer spaces of the park. The social spaces for games and activities are considered making the park an extended civic space.

Patrick Stack The thesis addresses sacred space in a mixed multi-ethnic city. An interfaith centre on Parnell Street at the heart of the city provides a home for a variety of specific groups that practice in various corners of the city. The different needs of the varied

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practices and diverse cultures of the groups are set against a common purpose.

Donncha O’Brien Tymon park functioned, before the construction of the M50, as a shared amenity for Tallaght, Templeogue and Walkinstown. The project’s aim is to re-establish and consolidate this

(top)

role by placing a Library into the park. Cedric

YMCA precendent model

Price’s ethic of enabling and empowering

Patrick Stack

citizens underpins the work. The functioning of the library, in the context of the park becomes

(bottom)

more playful and it in turn lends gravitas

Tymon Park, new route

and thought to the physicality of the park.

Donncha O’Brien

COMBINATION

ESSAY / NIALL MCLAUGHLIN

‘Antiphon’ – The Tracing Floor Niall McLaughlin

Project Team Stephen Tierney Pierre Jolivet Kirstie Smeaton Drawing Team Tim Allen-Booth Ciaran Conlon Maria Fulford Joanna Karatzas Niall McLaughlin Eóin Murphy

The Tracing Floor was made in response to a request from the School of Architecture in UCD to create an exhibition that would accompany our lecture in the Into Practice series being held there. We were invited to show one building and we chose the new chapel for Ripon Theological College in Oxfordshire. The title of the series made us think about the way we design and we wanted to make something for the event.

We were offered a room for the exhibition, which is connected by a doorway to the lecture hall. We chose to make something that would stand beside, rather than duplicate, the content of the lecture.

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iii

Squarings? In the game of marbles, squarings Were all those anglings, aimings, feints and squints You were allowed before you’d shoot, all those

Hunkerings, tensings, pressures of the thumb, Test-outs and pull-backs, re-invisagings, All the ways your arms kept hoping towards

Blind certainties that were going to prevail Beyond the one-off moment of the pitch.

A million million accuracies passed

Between your muscles’ outreach and that space Marked with three round holes and a drawn line.

You squinted out from a skylight of the world.

—Seamus Heaney, Lightenings 1.iii, Seeing Things

In conceiving this piece, we reflected on a number of interrelated matters; the history of the building as the old Masonic School, remembered by elegant carved and tiled symbols on walls and floors; the exacting tradition of hand drawing in the School during my time there in the 1980s and a desire to communicate the contemplative and communal activity of drawing that is practiced in our own studio. We found a reference to the old English tradition of the tracing floor used by medieval masons to set out jigs for vaulting. Remnants of these can be found in cathedrals such as York, Wells and Hereford. They were made of plaster and they show the marks of drawing and cutting.

Professor John Tuomey described the exhibition room as the spiritual heart of the School and in the central flow of circulation. We were curious to know if it could be blocked and what effect that might have on movement in the building. We liked the idea of something very fragile becoming an obstruction.

By covering the floor in lime plaster we intended to create an inversion of the natural light in the space.

We wanted to fill the whole floor of the room. We hoped that foot traffic might gradually erase the drawing, enhancing its fugitive quality. We made a time-lapse piece from the ceiling recording its emergence and dissolution. We edited the film so that it has a drawing-like quality.

The drawing is a plan of the chapel showing many layers at once. The chapel is organised around one pure ellipse containing an antiphonal arrangement of seating, surrounded by a narrow ambulatory. The pure central geometry is focussed on the lectern and the altar. Outside the ambulatory, the singular form is broken down into a collection of attached structures that contain spaces for individuals or groups to pray in intimate settings.

In many of our buildings, the plan has a particular antecedent. Here, we acknowledge our debt to Rudolph Schwartz’ church of St Michael in Frankfurt from 1954. In our case, we moved the structure to within the surrounding walls, making a perimeter ambulatory to recreate the narrative of conversion suggested in Richard Sennet’s description of the San Costanza in Rome.

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COMBINATION

ESSAY / NIALL MCLAUGHLIN

162 The status of the drawing cannot be justified as a depiction, an instruction or a cutting jig. We consider the manual repetition of the original setting out of the ellipse as a meditative, ritual activity more akin to beating the bounds. The project team carried it out at a liminal moment in the life of the building; the design has been completed and the construction is soon to commence. This project is the slow, rhythmic act of making the piece. It allowed us to dwell in it in a way not permitted by deadlines and drawing software.

All the time we talked about how we got here and what the chapel might become. The marks on the floor are the record of a contemplative activity.

References Seamus Heaney. 1. iii Lightenings. Seeing Things. Faber (1992) John Harvey. A History of York Minster. Edited by G.F. Aylmer and Reginald Cant, (1977) Peter Salter. The Fan Vault. Architectural Review. (January 2011) Rudolf Schwartz, St Michael, Frankfurt am Main, (1954) Richard Sennet. Flesh and Stone. The Body and the City in Western Civilization.

(above) A delicate obstruction (opposite) Setting out Photos by Stephen Tierney

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COMBINATION

Skills workshops

WORKSHOP / MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 2 / SEMESTER 2

Andalucia Publication Workshop Wendy Barrett, Alice Clancy A publication workshop was held to produce a guidebook for the 2nd Year Study Trip. It included all of the buildings visited, and covered the cities of Seville and Granada, touching on the wider geographical, historical and cultural context.

Computer skills, layout techniques and graphic skills were also developed, with 18 students participating.

AAI Competition Gerry Cahill, Michael Pike Participation in the annual AAI 2nd Year competition was run as a week-long workshop with 15 students. The brief was for the design of public toilets on a site selected by each entrant and addressed issues of public space, privacy and ergonomics. The majority of the students chose sites in Chapelizod to connect with the year’s work. The main challenge was to make a very rapid design proposal and to present that clearly and succinctly in a competition format.

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Structure through Sculpture Anne Gorman Following introductory presentations, students explored a range of self-supporting structural sculptures using simple materials. Drawings were made of the pieces, and simple structural analysis undertaken. The objects were critiqued from an aesthetic and structural perspective, considering aesthetic rhythm, load path predictions, geometry, direction of forces and redundancy in the designs.

Theatre Set Design Kevin Donovan, Fiona Hughes This workshop was a brief introduction to the creative processes involved in representing a play in a theatre. Over two and a half days students made proposals for set designs.

The work included the survey of the theatre space and the construction of a model box, the elaboration of story boards and moment drawings in the making of 1:25 model proposals.

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Andalucia Publication Workshop Photo by Alice Clancy

COMBINATION

WORKSHOP / UPPER SCHOOL / SEMESTER 1

Darcspace Workshop and Exhibition

Tutors Mary Laheen Alan Mee Jenny O’Leary Marcus Donaghy Hosts Denis Byrne Maggie Moran Students Timothy Brick Emma Byrne Signe Carlsen Rachel Carmody Lisa Cassidy Alexander Crean Andras Dankhazi Andrea Doyle Rachel Dudley Leonie Fitzgerald Denis Forrest Ciara Grace Kate Griffin Eoin Horner Alison Hyland Raphael Keane Damien King Zoé Laebens Cillian Magee Aonghus McDonnell

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As an annexe to the Square studio students returned to work in situ in the North inner city for Vertical Semester ‘Ventilate’ week.

The workshop was used to revisit sites and interrogate the territory more deeply while making individual and collective pieces of work in response to context, in the field of darcspace gallery on North Great Georges Street. The gallery was used as base from which to operate and mount specific explorations of emerging projects, in parallel with hanging measured survey drawings and models of Mountjoy Square.

Media ranged from models and drawings to video, where one resident of the North Georgian core recollected tenement life in twentieth century Dublin.

Patrick McGlade Steven McNamara Barbara McShane Sorcha Murphy Enda Naughton Aisling Ní Dhonnchú Donncha O’Brien Luke O’Callaghan Bláthmhac Ó Muirí Aisling O’Sullivan Patrick Phelan Orla Phillips Hugh Queenan Patrick Roche Christine Sassel Deirdre Spring Patrick Stack Adrian Sweeney David Walsh Jamie Young

Contributors Denis Byrne Philip Nolan Ali Grehan Hugh Campbell Michael Pike Exhibition Opening Night Photo by Jamie Young

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COMBINATION

Digital Drawing

Tutors David Healy Donal O’Herlihy

WORKSHOP / MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 3 / SEMESTER 2

Digital drawing was a weekly workshop run in tandem with the main studio project in the second semester of third year. The aim of the workshop was to investigate methods of digital drafting and to develop design concepts through the medium of drawing. It offered students a chance to examine their project through a singular focused optic.

Students learned skills general to all digital drawing programs, and the process was thought of as lessons in drafting rather than in specific programme technique. Classes gave students the opportunity to develop both technical and drafting skills, and to become conscious of the use and effect of various modes of representation.

Initial weeks were focused on the acquisition of technical competency followed by a more individualised phase where students were encouraged to develop their own personal approach to digital drafting. Through this students progressed their designs and began to find an unique means of expression in the medium.

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Isometric layered drawing Ultan Ă“ Conchubhair

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COMBINATION

EVENT / LECTURE SERIES / SEMESTERS 1 & 2

Visiting Critics Lunchtime Lecture Series

In 2010–11, a number of visitors to the school were also invited to present their thoughts and work in the Red Room as part of a lunchtime lecture series.

Lectures 19th November 2010 David Chipperfield David Chipperfield Architects

3rd December 2010 Paul Keogh RIAI President

12th February 2011 Nicholas Fox-Weber Architectural historian

19th February 2011 Paul Clarke University of Ulster, Belfast

4th March 2011 David Leatherbarrow University of Pennsylvania

1st April 2011 Leon van Schaik RMIT, Melbourne

20th May 2011 Paul Robbrecht Robberecht en Daem Architects, Belguim

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David Chipperfield lecture Photo by Alice Clancy

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Room to Manoeuvre Exhibition Photo by Stephen Tierney

OCCUPATION

TownLand

THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5

Tutors Fiona Hughes Orla Murphy Students Sean Finegan Leonie Fitzgerald Fergal Joyce Bláthmhac Ó Muirí Robert Tobin

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Reduce Produce Garden Robert Tobin

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TownLand examined ways in which morphology, movement and systems of exchange have defined the urban fabric of Irish towns and how they might offer alternative strategies for their future occupation.

Group members began their research by carrying out a series of tasks in Longford and Roscommon towns. A range of scales, media and techniques were used as lenses for this mapping. Descriptions of each place were brought back to the studio for shared analysis, review and discussion. Arising out of this research, Roscommon town was chosen as the site for the five thesis proposals.

Students developed their hypotheses firstly in relation to the individual building and at the same time considered as a group the cumulative creation of new public rooms and spaces, how they relate to one another and how they might build on the framework of the existing town.

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Robert Tobin’s thesis examines the re-inhabitation of vacated town cores as a counter-point to peripheral expansion.

His proposal is to insert thirty dwellings into the centre of Roscommon, each of which include space for production as an integral part, is a reinterpretation of the traditional ‘living above the shop’ model. Shared gardens, workshops and market space provide opportunity for exchange and work.

OCCUPATION

THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5

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Institute of Craft & Design Bláthmhac Ó Muirí

An interest in zenithal light and the connection between craft and society informs Bláthmhac Ó Muirí’s Institute of Technology and Craft Design. The college is organised around a series of courtyards and at the scale of the town, the college acts as connective tissue between existing playfields and public space.

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Fergal Joyce‘s transition homes propose an alternative dwelling system for young adults. Detailed analysis of how we live moulds the dwelling from the inside out, while spatial exploration of the shared public functions informs the external

Dwelling

massing and shaping of public space.

Fergal Joyce

OCCUPATION

THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5

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Roscommon Mart Leonie Fitzgerald

Roscommon Livestock Mart is preparing to leave its town centre site in favour of an out-of-town alternative. Leonie Fitzgerald’s project makes an argument for maintaining the mart and all its ancillary noise, smell and theatre in the heart of the town, celebrating the boundaries and connections between town and country. Through analysis of the system of exchange and its overlap with public space the mart is again experienced as a central public place in the life of a town.

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Roscommon Theatre Sean Finegan

An alternative approach to traditional theatre is explored in Sean Finegan’s proposal for a new performance space.

A cafĂŠ and series of public spaces bridge the transition from street to theatre. The building is designed to provide an adaptable canvas, which can be manipulated to suit the varying requirements of contemporary theatre and the relationship between the performer and the audience.

OCCUPATION

‘DRAFT’ The Dwelling and the City – An urban plot for generations x, y & z Dartmouth Square, Dublin

(opposite & below) Group reviews Photos by Stephen Tierney

STUDIOS / FOUNDATION / SEMESTER 2

The greater part of the fabric of our cities is made of residential units that conform to a number of building types, from the perimeter apartment block to the garden villa. The urban fabric of Dublin is defined by long, narrow garden plots, developed to the front and rear; lending the city its own unique grain and scale, and consequently its character. In undertaking the design of a small, integrated part of the city by intervening in this urban structure the project sought to consider the relationship between the anonymous or typical and the exceptional, between a work of conscious authorship and autonomy and one of contingency and interdependence. Further complexity was raised by considering the relationship between the public realm and the private domain, between inside and outside, material treatment and expression.

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OCCUPATION

STUDIOS / FOUNDATION / SEMESTER 2

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Dwelling House Lee Dinh

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Plan and section Donal McElwaine

OCCUPATION

STUDIOS / FOUNDATION / SEMESTER 2

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(above) Plot plan and section Kevin O’Brien

(opposite) Study model Simon McGough

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OCCUPATION

EXHIBITION / SEMESTER 2

The Secret Laboratory Notebooks and Narratives February & March 2011

Participants Grafton Architects Tom de Paor Shane O’Toole Peter Cody Ciaran Mackel Tarla MacGabhann Nigel Murray Seamus Lennon Nigel Peake Niall O’Hare Michael Doherty Susie Carson Gerry Cahill Sheila O’Donnell John Tuomey

The Secret Laboratory revealed the hidden world of the architects’ sketchbook. Shown together as a selection of local, national and international architects – based in Ireland and Northern Ireland, the exhibition revealed the ideas, observations, thoughts and reflections that are often concealed in a drawer, a coat pocket or in the individual imagination of the architect. What ideas do architects carry with them in their pockets? And how do they use the ‘device’ of the sketchbook?

The architects in this exhibition ranged from practitioners, to writers, lecturers, critics, illustrators and artists, all working in different areas of architecture and in different ways. Revealed in the Secret Laboratory for the first times is a series of private reflections made public.

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The Secret Laboratory was a joint exhibition between PLACE and the University of Ulster, curated by Paul Clarke and co-designed and built by Niall O’Hare.

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The notebooks of Gerry Cahill in the exhibition Photo by Stephen Tierney

OCCUPATION

Scale and Identity in the Housing Projects of Coderch Michael Pike

ESSAY / MICHAEL PIKE

The Modern Movement, and particularly Le Corbusier, have been criticised for their making of ‘complex house-simple city’ (Rowe and Koetter 1984: 93), a reference to the way in which the richness of the designs for private houses were lost at the urban scale. As Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter have noted: The public world is simple, the private world is elaborate: and, if the private world affects a concern for contingency, the would be public personality long maintained an almost too heroic disdain for any taint of the specific.

—(1984: 93)

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The housing projects of the Catalan architect Jose Antonio Coderch display an intense preoccupation with this balance between the scale of the home and the scale of the city. He endeavoured to maintain the complexity and richness of the individual dwelling within his collective schemes. This paper aims to investigate this question of scale and identity in Coderch’s work using the example of one project: the Banco Urquijo housing project in Barcelona, completed in 1972. The intention is to examine the way in which Coderch explores an intermediate scale in this project, a scale that is capable of relating to the historic city and that ensures that the identity of the individual homes can be maintained.

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In 1970 the Italian architect Giancarlo de Carlo, a prominent member of Team 10, wrote an essay entitled ‘Architecture’s Public’ that began to politicise the criticism of the Modern Movement inherent in the discussions of Team 10 over the previous fifteen years. He launched a vehement critique of the architects’ role in the post-war housing boom and their complicity in providing ‘cultural alibis for the most ferocious economic speculation and the most obtuse political inefficiency’ (de Carlo 1992: 207). In response to the urban housing shortage they had provided remedies that reduced housing ‘to the absolute minimum which could be tolerated in terms of surface and space’ (1992: 207). They had, according to de Carlo, lost all sense of their wider cultural commitment and had played into the hands of the power structure. The ‘brilliant solutions’ that they proposed became over the proceeding forty years ‘houses and neighbourhoods and suburbs and then entire cities, palpable manifestations of an abuse perpetrated first on the poor and then even on the not-so-poor’ (1992: 207).

De Carlo had been introduced to Team 10 by the Catalan architect Jose Antonio Coderch and it is perhaps in this architect’s housing projects that this critique of the large-scale post-war housing finds its most eloquent expression. Coderch had initially been skeptical about the architect’s ability to successfully address issues of mass housing. In the discussion of the Candilis-Josic-Wood’s project for Toulouse Le-Mirail at the Royaumont Meeting in 1962 he had thrown serious doubt upon whether projects of such a vast scope could lie within the grasp of the individual designer or design team:

housing and the search for individual identity within these large scale proposals finds a resonance in the later work of Coderch.

House and City Coderch’s work was fundamentally concerned with the design of domestic space, involving a large number of single-family houses and a series of housing projects. The projects for individual houses were used to develop Coderch’s ideas about the arrangement of domestic space and these ideas were then transposed to the larger proposals.

The project for Banco Urquijo was entrusted to Coderch in 1967. This involved the construction of fifty four apartments and other facilities on a sloping site in the affluent Sant Gervasi district of Barcelona.

The client was a Madrid-based commercial bank seeking to build the project as an investment. The appointment of Coderch was made after the director and architect of the bank visited the Hotel del Mar in Palma, a project completed in 1964.

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In my limitations I think that it is very necessary for me, many times, to complete only a little thing within six months; I am able to make one thing. It is a great responsibility to compromise in this way.

—(Smithson 1991: 98)

It is clear, however, that his participation in Team 10 had an increasing influence on his work, particularly in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The consideration within the group given to the importance of the architect’s involvement in mass

Urban Scale Coderch’s preoccupation with scale and his critique of the post-war approach to housing is clearly evident from the initial strategy adapted for the project. The approved planning scheme for the site showed two free-standing tower blocks occupying the northern side and this was quickly rejected by the architect in favour of a medium-rise solution that would relate to the scale of the surrounding buildings. Coderch therefore begins the project with a critique, a direct prejudice against the thinking that had dominated architectural discourse over the previous forty years. The alternative strategy involved the making of six blocks of between five and six storeys that rise up from a plinth that adapts the scheme to the slope and provides the space for a range of offices and communal facilities. The six residential blocks are all accessible from the two longitudinal streets and the space in between becomes a series of shared gardens. In this way the buildings take on the scale of a series of villas and relate directly to the surrounding fabric. Prominence is given to the

OCCUPATION

ESSAY / MICHAEL PIKE

public realm of the street through the placement of the entranceways and the semi-private gardens are deliberately half-open rather than closed to this public realm. In this way the urban block becomes visually, if not physically, permeable.

An appropriate urban scale is re-established through the use of a very limited palette of materials – terracotta tiles and vertical timber slats in front of the openings. These materials are disposed in large uninterrupted vertical planes. The language is one of wall and the absence of wall, rather than a language of individual windows and openings. This gives the elevations a more abstract and unified quality.

from these projects. This dilemma is described by Adrian Forty through the phrase ‘user’, common to the architectural discourse of this period: the ‘user’ was always a person unknown – and so in this respect a fiction, an abstraction without phenomenal identity… its merit is to allow discussion of people’s inhabitation of a building while suppressing all the differences that actually exist between them.

—(Forty 2004: 312)

Coderch does not have direct access to the ‘user’ and therefore relies on the previous creation of a home for a private client to attempt to meet their future needs.

Dwelling Scale Detail Scale

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The plans of the dwellings in Banco Urquijo are direct adaptations of a number of Coderch’s singlefamily houses, principally the Uriach House, built in L’Ametlla del Valles outside Barcelona in 1961. These houses are characterised by a clear organisation of the house into functional zones – living, sleeping and service. The L-shaped plan of the Uriach house forms an outdoor room, a patio that nonetheless remains half-open to its surroundings. The living areas then relate directly to this patio. The plan is also notable for the staggered arrangement of the bedrooms, providing oblique and democratic views for each of the rooms, as well as creating a more dynamic and less monotonous corridor.

In Banco Urquijo this plan is then paired and stacked to make an apartment layout. This recalls Aldo van Eyck’s phrase, ‘a house is a tiny city, a city a huge house’ (Hertzberger 1991: 126). The private patio of the Uriach house becomes in this version an in-between space, a threshold between the public realm of the street and the private world of the apartment. The staggered arrangement of the bedrooms allows the apartments to effectively turn sideways to the street, exploiting the depth of the plot and avoiding the need for the interior lightwells that are commonplace in Barcelona.

Through this transposition of a plan for a tried and tested single family dwelling into a grouping of apartments Coderch attempts to overcome the dilemma posed by the disappearance of the client

The pre-occupation with scale is also carried through to the detailed construction of the building. In Banco Urquijo, as has been previously mentioned, the window, in a traditional sense, disappears. It becomes simply an absence of wall, a floor to ceiling glazed opening that is then protected by a balcony and a screen of vertical triangle-shaped timber slats. These screens are hinged and can be pivoted to create different levels of openness and privacy. These layered openings create rooms that are filled with light and yet closed, recallling the wood strip lamp designed

by Coderch in 1952. Through this emphasis on the design of the intermediate spaces these dwellings become like ‘a half-open organism’ (Abalos 2001: 98), as the architect Saenz de Oiza has described it. Coderch combines the privacy of the traditional Mediterranean courtyard house and the modernist transparent apartment to make a new form of dwelling, capable of accommodating the physical and psychological needs of the modern household in dense urban contexts.

Close to the Ground Team 10 presented themselves as rebelling against what they saw as ‘the ‘mechanistic’ approach of the older generation of modern architects – Le Corbusier, Gropius, Giedion – and the postwar

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Banco Urquijo Section and Elevation Drawing by Michael Pike

reconstruction schemes carried out in their name’ (Lefaivre and Tzonis 1999: 9). They wished to replace what they saw as the mechanistic doctrines of CIAM applied during the postwar reconstruction with a more humanistic architecture. On examination of the built production of the Team 10 members, however, it is clear that many of the housing projects still bear a close attachment to the Avant Garde of the Modernist period, particularly Le Corbusier. Proposals such as the Smithson’s Golden Lane or Candilis-Josic-Woods’ Toulouse Le-Mirail are cloaked in a new terminology, but remain ostensibly loyal to the compositional methods of their predecessors.

Coderch, as has been referred to, was not influenced by Le Corbusier in the same way. He emerged from a different tradition to many of the other Team 10 members and his direct influences were Spanish, Italian and Scandinavian. The influence of Alvar Aalto provided Coderch with an escape from the rationalizing process that inhibited

the Smithsons. Alan Colquhuon has described Aalto’s distinct approach which was rooted in the practice of architecture: The Modern Movement in its early phase was concerned with the general schemata by which both society and architecture could be reconstructed according to rational principles. Apparently Aalto never concerned himself with such universalism. He was content to remain “close to the ground” and to follow where his instinct for form led him.

—(1981: 75)

For Coderch, as for Aalto, this capacity to remain ‘close to the ground’ is based on the central role given to the drawing in their design practice. The drawing becomes the means of connecting to the real circumstances of the future inhabitants, it is as Ernst Gombrich has described it: ‘the means to probe reality and to wrestle with the particular’ (1969: 173). The sketch drawings for Banco Urquijo that are held in the Coderch Archive all show this

OCCUPATION

ESSAY / MICHAEL PIKE

concern for the small scale, with the dimensions and use of rooms and with the layering and control of the rooms’ enclosures. A process of constant overlay is used to make alterations and adjustments. For Coderch drawing was a process of discovery and enabled a close connection to the contingencies of everyday life. Aalto used the dictum ‘to include everything’ and Coderch responds to this challenge:

For example, what should I say about Antonio Coderch?

Except that he was the most gifted architect of the lot. A great architect. He was very emotional, he didn’t argue much, a solitary figure; he was severe, morally severe, but not dogmatic; he was a puritan and catholic. He was a genius architect. He wrote the article ‘It isn’t geniuses we need now’, but he really was a genius, a fantastic architect, an artist.

—(Risselda and van den Heuvel 2005: 329)

All those casual and temporal aspects which originate in the necessities of practical, real life, and which Mies eliminates or

References

hides, are for Coderch genuine sources of inspiration.

Abalos, I, The Good Life, Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, (2001)

—(Montaner 1998: 29)

Colquhuon, A, ‘Alvar Aalto: Type versus Function’, in Essays in Architectural Criticism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, (1981)

In this way it is evident that the Banco Urquijo has been designed from the inside-out. The staggered form of the buildings is sufficiently loose-fit to enable it to adapt to the developing intricacies of the interior layout. There is also an implied negation of the elevation, which becomes a mere consequence of the spatial configuration of the dwellings. Through this inside-out strategy Coderch endeavoured to maintain the complexity and richness of the individual dwelling within a collective scheme. He strived to make the apartments into homes in the same way as he had approached his designs for single-family houses.

Banco Urquijo presents a very compelling example of an intermediate scale, of a counter-proposal to the vast post-war projects that instead addresses the specificity of its location and that can relate to an existing urban context. By operating at this critical scale, between the dwelling and the urban block, Coderch develops a proposition where the coherence of van Eyck’s city and house is perceptible and where each can be a vital and tangible cultural force. At this intermediate scale Coderch comes closest to this equilibrium between the home and the city and achieves, perhaps, the most convincing embodiment of the ideas of Team 10 in relation to housing design. As van Eyck remarked in an interview in 1991:

de Carlo, G, ‘Architecture’s Public’, in B. Zucchi (ed.) Giancarlo de Carlo, Oxford: Butterworth Architecture, (1992), pp. 204–15.

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Forty, A, Words and Buildings, A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture, New York: Thames & Hudson, (2004)

Gombrich, E, Art & Illusion, Princeton: Princeton University Press, (1969) Hertzberger, H, Lessons for Students in Architecture, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, (1991)

Lefaivre, L. and Tzonis, A, Aldo van Eyck Humanist Rebel, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, (1999) Montaner, JM, Casa Ugalde, Barcelona: COAC, (1998) Smithson, A (ed.), Team 10 Meetings, New York: Rizzoli, (1991) Risselda, M. and van den Heuvel, D. (eds), Team 10: In Search of a Utopia of the Present, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, (2005) Rowe, C. and Koetter, F, Collage City, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, (1984)

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Banco Urquijo Typical Floor Plan Drawing by Michael Pike

OCCUPATION

Halls

THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5

Inital city and site strategy Áine Nic an Ríogh

Tutors Emmett Scanlon Sarah Cremin Students Timothy Brick Peter Cosgrave Raphael Keane Áine Nic an Ríogh Aisling Ní Dhonnchú

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We proposed that projects would evolve from the close observation of the interior and rooms, especially the public, collective rooms of Irish towns. We posed the question what is a public room, anymore, anyway? We proposed that projects would emerge from the specific, that projects might be modest, and that projects would think strategically and in detail about halls, stairs and landings as a means of answering the theme of the studio. Working in Kilkenny and Limerick cities, the aim was that students would take everyday, ordinary activities and use these to ground architectural programmes and propositions, to work from the specific to a general proposition about public interior life in the contemporary city.

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ﾃ（ne Nic an Rﾃｭogh made a modern inn and productive garden, a place for locals and travellers, workers and diners, to overlap and interact. Working from a study of the social organization of great Irish houses and their landscapes, her project aimed to interweave disparate social groups with a hall, stairs and landing and was a key project in the groups overall landscape strategy for Kilkenny.

OCCUPATION

THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5

196 Peter Cosgrave was concerned with the

(above)

economy and sustainable business life of

Study model

the Irish town. Working from a study of the

Peter Cosgrave

grain and lanes of Kilkenny, Peter’s project proposed learning, shared and public

(right)

rooms for people wishing to learn how to

Stair core

and start a business, occupying a stepped

Aisling Ní Dhonnchú

site on the main street in Kilkenny city.

Aisling Ní Dhonnchú used a filter of social exclusion to examine the built environment in Kilkenny. Her project, working, learning and living accommodation for adults with intellectual disability occupies a narrow site facing to Kilkenny castle. Her project aimed to protect and maintain the dignity of this community while investigating the potential of architecture to connect the individual back into society.

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197 Raphael Keane made a cinema and film

(above)

school on the oldest street in Limerick city.

Entrance – Limerick Film School

In an area of severe social depravation,

Raphael Keane

the film school was a strategy to offer something back to the local community on

(right)

the premise that film is democratic and

Landing space

requires no formal training in order to begin.

Timothy Brick

Timothy Brick made a new primary school along the river in Kilkenny on a steeply sloping site. The project sought to examine learning in the landscape, making a building which seeks to address the neglected Kilkenny river front.

OCCUPATION

LECTURE / PETER CARL

Visiting critic Peter Carl delivered a lecture or rumination on this question in the Red Room at Richview in February.

What is a City for?

Notes from a lost notebook Peter Carl

The lecture ranged through concrete images of cities and scenes with which we associate the city, plumbing its origins and construction as a built embodiment of culture, ethics and aesthetics, virtue in vital congress with vice. Notations of the forces and fields of thought and action embodied in the ideal of the city. The practice of civilization; not in instrumental terms; but in ethical and spatial practice – the edifice of society, (‘all true ideals practical’), virtue built into the prevailing conditions. These are some hastily jotted notes, drawn out in the dark of the red room on an empty stomach.

Some ingredients perhaps for foundations – how one might mix them depending on conditions. Read between the lines of the recipe as noted cursorily here.

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Aristotles: The Nichomachean Ethics, The Politics…

Polis: The good life, individually and collectively – virtue.

Priene – model.

Hierarchy of: Pleasure; politics; contemplation.

The good Polis – positioned between mountain and shore.

Logos/nomos (culture) Sophia – wisdom Phronesis – practical wisdom(praxis) – techne – fundamental conditions (nature, physics) The agricultural city, enduring for two millennia – not just a passing development as dismissed by Kevin Lynch Siena – Salle de Nobile – Good and Evil drawn into play on the walls of a room crossing or parting the city wall – both, or neither inter or extra mural; a centre lodged in the edge,

containing an edenic view to landscape and town beneath, juxtaposed with a symbolic fresco of the last judgement – town in a deep horizon.

Temenos: an open topped space.

Agon: conflict in which all sides included; dissent and authority (how happy the city whose citizens disobey?) chthonic; necessity of danger (vital) We are perhaps drawn to cities piecemeal, at risk, blocks within blocks, town within a block, deep background, garden to street, towns within towns.

Agorra a forum of ideas extended to street.

Ethos – (freedom for) versus freedom from in Nietsche. civitas/urbs Rampant instrumentalism flattens cities as we march to render them amenable to ‘design’.

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Serlio’s Tragic set rendition of ordered city vs less ordered edge – Plan Voisin deeming Marais a slum.

Ethos over Economics which reduces nature to statistical terms.

19th century metropolis – mass culture of café arcades and museums, skewed by de Chirico’s views from the underbelly of sanitization.

Cities and global warming put the collaborative on the agenda – figuring out the local.

Milan and its metamophologies; 16th–17th century; 18th–19th century; 20th century … denaturing city.

Civics swallowed by statistics.

No polis when people measured merely materially, ‘those with and without lavatories’ as distinct from their time and their politics. Sociology as a dessicant, setting terms such as Agent and Subject charting no where and no how of dwelling.

Society seen through Smith’s prism of selfish motivation.

Lynch’s Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive – Stairs as places of strange encounter

In reaction Rossi and Rowe were reductive in their figure & ground – type & monument these were radical oversimplifications.

City has many more tones than Rossi and Rowe – space promiscuous in its associations.

Meanwhile there are fundamental physics; entropy in matter; information and energy, economics – freedom from Lefebvre: Humanist…

Planners and Technocrats thwart city life, turning culture upside down… …space becomes its own delirium, minutely planned and oppressive.

Or – Politics – dignity – city serving as an infrastructure for open aleotoric culture –

I digress (or do I) – back to praxis – habitual action.

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American City as 3D graph of land consumption.

A fifth and further flattening by semiotics – city of signs, city at night – removed from earth the actual city goes dark disappearing behind its other of illuminated instructions.

A city’s interior – Joyces rendition of the Ormond Hotel; ‘Bloom alone’ in restaurant and Dedalus pére et fils signing alongside in saloon adjacent, a sardine and some bread on plate beneath a glass dome (or more). Anastatis – Rotunda… this morsel & some earlier digressions by Carl on, ‘comic sets’ modeling cities in depth, makes me think of Vivien Mercier’s, The Irish Comic Tradition, ‘…an unbroken comic tradition may be traced in Irish literature from approximately the ninth century down to the present day’ (i). komos – revel + aeidos – singer.

Carl closed with reference to the origin or (arche) from which things come to be, setting out a field of conditions which one might take to be for the city. episteme – knowledge; logos/nomos – culture: all tied back to nature – nasci born, with much in between which this witness was not swift enough record.

Someone commented ‘you needed a town with a university to have a conversation like this’. It probably helps to have a space as promiscuous as a the red room in a school of architecture which might live up to it. (Carl cautions against the ‘research economy’) This notebook ends on this lecture at the bottom of the back cover with notes as follows: Renovato urbis – city of opportunity – Architecture – a horizon for praxis Note: The above is a more or less direct transcription of the notes in this notebook and if it commits epistemological gaffes in translation or fails to answer the question of what a city is for, that is the fault of the transcription and not the original lecture which clearly set out what a city is for. Read between the lines or view the lecture at http://www.ucd.ie/arcel/architecture/what_is/index.htm

Project as you will.

OCCUPATION

STUDIOS / MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 2 / SEMESTER 2

Living Dimensions – Housing Design Chapelizod, County Dublin

Focusing on one of three sites of varying conditions, the class examined how best each could be inhabited. How could an intervention create a place that is great to live in? How can housing reinforce a sense of place, a connection to the community and a relationship with the wider context? Each student was asked to examine how residential units could be flexible and adaptable to accommodate different occupants with varied working, living and social demands for the period the lifetime. Particular consideration was given to issues of: Form & Context, Density & Scale, Structure & Materials, Circulation & Access, Function & Habitation

200 (above) Section through a housing unit (below) Townland section Gerda Ziemele

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STUDIOS / MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 2 / SEMESTER 2

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(opposite & above) Typological approaches to site Photos by Alice Clancy

OCCUPATION

SCHOOL TRIP / MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 2 / SEMESTER 2

Andalucia, Spain Sketches, pictures and measured drawings 11th–15th March 2011

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(above) Measured plan, section and elevation of Sala de Mexuar Alan Meredith

(opposite) Site visit Photo by Alice Clancy

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SCHOOL TRIP / MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 2 / SEMESTER 2

(opposite) Sketching at the Alhambra Photo by Alice Clancy

(left) Alhambra fountain John Nolan

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OCCUPATION

Encounters with Socrates Samantha Martin-McAuliffe

ESSAY / SAMANTHA MARTIN-McAULIFFE

‘[Socrates], would you like to step aside here from the street into the Stoa of Zeus Eleutherios?’

1

Fig. 1 Montage showing a reconstructed view from the Panathenaic Way in the southeast corner of the Athenian Agora Image by author

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Many buildings in Athens play supporting roles in the Socratic dialogues. Often, the architecture goes virtually unnoticed, offering a definite sense of place yet discretely settling into the background of the conversation. Buildings are mentioned for the sake of orientation, but they are not explicitly described or the subject of conversation. Yet, to some degree, it is precisely the lack of commentary about the architectural characteristics of these structures that gives us important insight to how they functioned in the life of the city. One type of building in particular became a favourite haunt for Socrates: the stoa.

The Greek stoa – a freestanding colonnaded hall – was the most common form of architecture in the Athenian Agora. By the end of the classical period there were at least four stoas standing in the civic centre, and many more were added in the following centuries. The stoa is a type of building, and yet it does not readily fit into our understanding of a building typology. While we can instantly recognise a building as a stoa by looking at its ground plan, it is virtually impossible to know about its specific function and meaning until we study its context and the primary testimonia (such as the Socratic dialogues) associated with it.

Archaeological excavations can also reveal other important clues, such as whether a stoa was used for dining or sympotic activities; or whether it housed important items, like paintings, votives and law codes. Unlike other buildings in the Agora, for example the bouleuterion (senate house), the stoa did not have a clear-cut or primary function. Rather, it was inherently flexible and calculatedly versatile.

Instead of hosting a single prominent activity or institution, it most often had a plurality of uses, and often these overlapped, changed with time or even disappeared.2 Understanding the stoa within these parameters poses certain problems, not because

this kind of architecture did not accommodate important functions,3 but rather because it hosted so many.

The design and placement of the stoas in the Athenian Agora made them especially amenable to philosophical discourse. Their long, interior expanses not only provided shade from the scorching sun, but also were well suited for the peripatetic amble and stroll of philosophers. Beyond this, they offered a respite, a place away from the clamour, traffic and business of the adjoining streets. But the stoas were not necessarily destinations in and of themselves.

While they could be the setting for functions of monumental importance, they more frequently were places for waiting, loitering and for pausing while en route somewhere else. All of them were situated on the topographical limits of the Agora, with their colonnaded facades facing into the civic centre.4 This meant that while the stoas were marginal in a physical sense, they always offered direct and immediate visual (as well as aural) contact with both places and people across the entirety of the Agora; and sometimes even beyond to the Acropolis and Areopagus. Collectively, the stoas created a kind of spatial framework that articulated the borders of the Agora and imparted a sense of volume (Fig. 1).

Individually, they provided constantly shifting framed views through their rows columns (Fig. 2).

Belonging to no one exclusively, the stoas inevitably became common to all. Plato, Xenophon and Aeschines deliberately locate Socrates in the Stoa of Zeus Eleutherios. Significantly, this edifice, which stood in near the northwestern corner of the square, was perhaps the first Greek stoa to demonstrate a projecting wing design whereby two shorter, prostyle colonnades at each end of the building jutted-forth to create a pi-shaped plan;5 these wings stood at

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3

In fact, Demosthenes [25.20.23] asserts that the boule met at one point in the Stoa Basileios.

4 1

[Pl.] Theages 121a. Agora III.34, trans.

2

It should be noted that a frequent point of confusion is the relationship between the terms ‘stoa’ and ‘stoics’. The philosophical

An exception to this convention was the Middle Stoa, which remains a conundrum. This building is now the subject of further study by the author.

5

Other known stoas with this plan are the Stoa of Philip in

followers of Zeno of Kition became known as the Stoics for their

Megalopolis, Stoa with Wings on Thasos, the Bouleuterion in

predilection of meeting in the Stoa Poikile, but they did not arrive in

Mantinea, the Propylaia on Lindos, Stoa F at Kalauria, the Stoa of

Athens until the Hellenistic period.

Antigonos on Delos and the Stoa on Lindos. See Coulton, 1976.

OCCUPATION

ESSAY / SAMANTHA MARTIN-McAULIFFE

Fig. 2 Initial study of the view from the inside of the Stoa of Zeus, looking east in the early afternoon Image by author

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right angles to the centre colonnade.6 Acknowledging the stoa as a setting is highly significant because it suggests that Socrates’ presence was a predictable and thus habitual situation. Mabel Lang rightfully reminds us that Plato was not a historian, and so “we cannot know that Socrates held a particular conversation in a specific place, but surely the scenes in which the Dialogues are set had to be places where contemporary readers would have expected such discussions to take place.”7 We can productively extend this hypothesis: In being used as a setting for impromptu and informal encounters, the Stoa of Zeus, although architecturally monumental, could also be understood as a typical, even ordinary location.

6

Coulton, 1976, 41. The wings are both hexastyle. The building was one of the first to incorporate a re-entrant triangle. For further discussion and bibliography of this architectural situation, see J.J. Coulton, “The Treatment of Re-entrant Angles,” BSA 61 (1966):

Three Socratic dialogues take place in the Stoa of Zeus: Theages, Eryxias and a conversation in the Oeconomicus of Xenophon. Each of these texts instills a nonchalant tenor toward the choice of the stoa as a setting. It is not a planned terminus of a journey but instead a convenient resting point. A passage from the Theages, which is quoted at the beginning of this essay, suggests that Socrates and his companion Demodocus are already deep in conversation when the latter suggests that they might take a rest within the shade of the colonnade. Fittingly, the archaeological record for this building indicates that a portion of its interior was fitted with benches.8 In the Eryxias, Socrates affords a laissez-faire attitude to how he struck up a conversation: “Eryxias, the son of Steirieus, happened to be walking in the Stoa of Zeus Eleutherios when Kritias and Erasistratos – the son of Phaiax, nephew of Erasistratos – came up … (and Erasistratos said) “but do allow us first

132–146.

7

M.L. Lang, Socrates in the Agora, vol. XVII, AgoraPicBk (Princeton: ASCSA, 1978), 8.

8

(Meritt), “1949,” 346. For the Stoa of Zeus, see Thompson, “1937,” 75, and Camp, 1990, 78.

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to sit down, for I am tired from having walked from Megara yesterday’”.9 This sense of insouciance is reiterated in Xenophon where the philosopher relates a chance encounter with Ischomachus: “So once seeing him sitting in the Stoa of Zeus Eleutherios apparently at leisure, I went up to him and sat beside him, asking, ‘Why are you sitting here, Ischomachus?’”10 Curiously, both the Theages and the Eryxias are considered spurious Platonic dialogues, but Lang convincingly postulates that “this may make the probability of their setting all the greater since imitators would take especial care to achieve verisimilitude.”11 Through examining these discussions it becomes apparent that the stoa is at once associated with the routine (being an instantly recognisable landmark; a popular meeting place) and the imaginative (hosting philosophic debate). Overall, these encounters manifest an interconnectedness of the solid and enduring architecture with the free and creative interaction of dialectic.

While the tone of the conversations in the Socratic dialogues suggests that the Stoa of Zeus was typically the location for informal discussions in the city, it also has been postulated that it should identified as the Thesmotheteion,12 or the office for the Eponymous archon.13 The thesmothetai (lawgivers or legislators) were the six legal and judicial archons (magistrates) of the city who worked together with the Polemarch, Eponymous archon and Basileios. They controlled the law courts and oversaw the recording of laws. Presumably, the classical Agora contained a Thesmotheteion, but no building has come to light that can unequivocally

be ascertained as such.14 By identifying a political office with the Stoa of Zeus, the colonnade can be associated with official deliberation as well as informal dialogue. It is interesting to note that a similar shaped stoa, the so-called Pi-Stoa in the agora on Thasos, displayed decrees relating to the archons and also was perhaps the site of judicial functions.15 While it is intriguing to infer that the fourth century Thasian building was a reinterpretation – both in plan and in function – of the Stoa of Zeus, the archaeological record unfortunately cannot corroborate this for certain.

We learn from Plato in his Euthyphro that Socrates reported to the Stoas of Zeus’ next-door neighbour, the Stoa Basileios, for his indictment in charges of impiety and the corruption of the Athenian youth. In the opening of the dialogue, the character Euthyphro directly questions Socrates: “What’s new, Socrates, to make you leave your usual haunts in the Lyceum and spend your time here by the Stoa Basileios? Surely you are not prosecuting anyone before the Archon Basileios as I am?”16 This initial exchange immediately divulges one of the principal purposes of the Stoa Basileios: Not only does this building accommodate the casual rendezvous, but it is also more formally a location for legal prosecution. Moreover, for the ancient reader of Plato’s dialogues, the mention of this stoa would have instantly brought to mind a whole host of activities and proceedings, from political meetings to the public exhibition of Athens’ laws.

The philosopher’s encounter with Euthyphro is coincidental, but the dialogue that ensues results from their respective concerns with the archon, who famously used the stoa as his office. In the Euthyphro, the dialogue concerns the nature of piety, thereby making the Stoa Basileios a germane yet immensely ironic setting. At the end of the

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9

[Pl.] Eryx. 392a; SLMM, trans.

10 Xen. Oec. 7.1. Agora III.36, trans.

11 Lang, 1987, 13.

12 Camp, 1992, 107, and N. Robertson, “The Headquarters of the Nine Archons in the Athenian Agora,” AJA 88 (1984): 257.

13 B. Meritt bases this assumption on the wording from an inscription (Agora I 749, lines 7–8, ca. 288/7–263/2 BC) that lauds and archon and his assistants. The stele should be set put before the Stoa of Zeus Eluetherios: “It is natural to suppose that the decree honoring an archon would be erected before his political office.” B.D. Meritt, “Greek Inscriptions,” Hesperia 5 (1936): 416–417.

14 Rotroff and Oakley argue that while it is possible to suggest that either the Stoa Basileios of the Stoa of Zeus were also once known as the Thesmotheteion, we do not have enough evidence to prove so. S. Rotroff and J.H. Oakley, “Debris from a Public Dining Place in the Athenian Agora,” Hesperia Supplement 25 (1992): 39–40.

15 É. Roland, ed., l’espace grec: 150 ans de fouilles de l’école française d’Athènes (Paris: Fayard, 1996), 109.

16 Pl. Euthphr.2a. Agora III.19, trans.

OCCUPATION

ESSAY / SAMANTHA MARTIN-McAULIFFE

Theaetetus Socrates also mentions his business at the very same building, saying that “Now I must go to the Stoa Basileios to meet the indictment that Meletus has brought against me; but let us meet here again in the morning, Theodorus”.17 Socrates uses the word apanteteon, which means ‘to present oneself’ or ‘reply’, as if his meeting with the Basileios is a continuation of an agonistic dialogue that has already begun.

Regardless of whether the Stoa of Zeus housed a political office, both it and the Stoa Basileios embodied a tension as the setting for positive conflict in the form of philosophical debate. It should be noted, however, that the stoas were equally the ground for negotiation, not just between the participants in a dialogue, but between discussions and the events transpiring outside of a stoa, that is, in the central, open realm of the Agora. Their colonnaded façades acted as a permeable border that at once cultivated reciprocity between dialogue and civic space, but also allowed for a sense of distance and momentary separation. This is especially apparent when we consider more closely how the Stoa of Zeus Eleutherios fostered visual connections between the events transpiring in a building and those on the roadways that intersected the Agora. Another passage from Eryxias confirms how this stoa was not only a location for intimate conversation but also a place from within which one could see other people, events or things: “While talking, a member of an embassy came by and Erasistratos said, ‘that man there, Socrates, is the wealthiest man in Sicily and Italy’”.18 The colonnaded aisles inside the stoa thus served as more than a meeting place or a lounge; they acted as observatories for people watching – in the case of Eryxias, harmless spying – and they served as shaded and elevated viewing platforms for the great festivals that transpired on the Panathenaic Way. Both the architecture and the orientation of the stoa enabled Athenians to take part in processions and festival events on the municipal street while simultaneously remaining at a comfortable distance.

Their location on the perimeter of the civic centre

afforded an encompassing, spectacular view. This precise situation is illustrated in another dialogue where Socrates relates how, while sitting in the Stoa of Zeus, he saw Miltiades participating in the Panathenaic Festival.19 These exchanges show how watching was neither voyeuristic nor indicative of covert observation. Rather, this kind of participation affirmed one’s place in the diversity of the civic realm.

Considered collectively, these encounters with Socrates highlight a crucial difference between the architecture of the stoa in general and the other buildings of the Agora. Half indoor, half outdoor, these colonnades sheltered the familiar and impromptu but situated them within the wider topography of the city. While many buildings throughout Athens hosted Socratic dialogues, the stoa alone simultaneously related people and places across the Agora through voice and image. Examining this mutuality between the viewer and the viewed clarifies how the stoas helped orchestrate a spectrum of communication throughout the civic realm, from the very personal to the distantly observed.

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(opposite) Courtyard, garden Photo by Ronan Kenny

17 Pl.Tht.210d. Agora III.20, trans.

18 [Pl.] Eryx. 392d. SLMM, trans.

19 Aeschin. Miltiades; see also Lang, 1987, 14.

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213

OCCUPATION

Learning Space – School Design Chapelizod, County Dublin

Staff Will Dimond Tiago Faria Eileen Fitzgerald Mary Laheen Stephen Mulhall Deirdre McKenna Aoibheann Ní Mhearain John Parker Peter Tansey

‘The most important task of learning is the insertion of the individual into the community through the development of a sense of personal responsibility, in such a way that the community that results represents more than the sum total of the individuals it contains. This aspect of education cannot be taught directly, it is rather a matter of general experience and the gradual formation of consciousness which allows the individual to find the right contact with public life and with the political community.’

—Hans Scharoun, Milan Triennale 1960

STUDIOS / MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 3 / SEMESTER 2

Students built on their study of collective space in Chapelizod to explore the role of architecture in providing for the educational needs of the community.

The group addressed fundamental questions about the kind of environment that makes an appropriate stepping stone into the community for its younger members, and the complex relationship between society and its built infrastructure.

For the child, the school is the place of transition from the utterly subjective experience of infancy to the challenge of community. This place of learning occupies a territory somewhat between home and ‘the world’. It was the intention to develop an understanding of the relationship between educational ethos and society through design, through analysis of precedent studies, and visits to exemplar buildings that reinforce ideas of learning and community through their architecture.

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(opposite top) Space for learning classroom model Domhnaill Byrne

(opposite top) Space for learning stairs and hallways model Michael Farrell

(above) Axonometric Donal Groarke

OCCUPATION

STUDIOS / MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 3 / SEMESTER 2

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Classroom study Jill L’Estrange

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217

Room study Sean Lynch

Organisational study model Donal Groarke

OCCUPATION

Porto, Portugal and Dublin, Ireland Experiencing Architecture – Observation and Analysis 13th–18th March 2011

SCHOOL TRIP / MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 3 / SEMESTER 2

Shifting focus towards the outcome of the architectural process – the space of the building as it has been constructed – students visited a number of buildings for education or community, both in Ireland and Portugal. They closely considered the measure of the spaces in relation to the body, the quality of light, the texture and finish of materials, the colour and reflection of surfaces, the atmosphere and how the spaces are used by those they were designed for.

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219

(opposite) Porto topography Photo by Alan Coughlan

(right) Brookfield Community Centre collage Jude Duffy

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SCHOOL TRIP / MIDDLE SCHOOL / YEAR 3 / SEMESTER 2

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(opposite) Threshold studies of Porto Photography Museum, Eduardo Souto de Moura Ultan Ó Conchubhair

(left) Sé Catedral public space measured section, Porto Kate Creegan

(below) Porto measured sketch section Alan Coughlan

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(following spread) Leça do Balio School, aNC arquitectos Photo by Alan Coughlan

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OCCUPATION

ESSAY / JORGE CARVALHO

I, the City Jorge Carvalho Translated by Tiago Faria

I just received your question five minutes ago: “What project by another author, most intensely bathes you in an atmosphere of desire?”

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I respond as you can see, immediately. As with all difficulties in life one should act before thinking; I am going to answer before I know what I am going to say and the answer will therefore have the royal seal of sincerity. I will however, translate the question into the following: Which was the project that most changed me in myself, into that other person that we all want to be? To this I have an answer – the immediate and unthought-out one I mentioned before, which must be the real one.

Then, that which is known as dreaminess arises in characters are eager for action. And do you know what a city dreamer is, gentlemen? In the streets, he walks with a drooping head, paying little attention to his surroundings… but if he does notice something, even the most ordinary trifle, the most insignificant fact assumes a fantastic colouring in his mind.

I have no job, and that makes me more available than most of people I know, more flexible in my routines. Social life in the city tends to be quite rigid. A simple dinner can take weeks of advance planning, and the best of friends can sometimes go months without any contact at all. With me, however, impromptu meetings are the norm. I work when the spirit moves me (most often late at night), and the rest of the time I roam free, prowling the streets of the city like some nineteenth-century flâneur, following my nose wherever it happens to take me. I walk, I go to museums and art galleries, I see movies in middle of the day, I read books on parks benches. I’m not beholden to the clock in the way other people are, and as a consequence I never feel as if I am wasting my time. In that sense, then, everything falls into the category of work for me.

Eating is work, watching basketball games is work, sitting with a friend in a bar at midnight is work. I walk and let the City take me into its protection.

Back in the lane, and a careless look at the surroundings cars and windows: oh, how I love this little square with its leafy villas and secret gardens!

Across the main road, down to the river’s edge, are those same lovers who kissed on the bench when I came up here before.

There is nothing better than the Avenue, at least in the City; it is everything for this City.

I know for a fact that none of its pale inhabitants and civil servants would swap the Avenue for all the riches in the world.

As soon as we are on the Avenue we discern the scent of an outing. Even if we have an urgent and indispensable matter to take care of, once we step onto it, any other matter is soon forgotten.

Thousands upon thousands of odours formed an invisible gruel that filled the street ravines, only seldom evaporating above the rooftops and never from the ground below. The people who lived there no longer experienced this gruel as a special smell; it had arisen from them and they had been steeped in it over and over again; it was, after all, the very air they breathed and from which they lived, it was like clothes you have worn so long you no longer smell them or feel them against your skin.

The Avenue is the place for generic communication in the City. Here, the dweller in neighbourhood P or V who has gone a few years without meeting his friend from neighbourhood Q or B can be certain, that inevitably he will come across him. There is no record of addresses or an information office that offers clearer clarification then the Avenue. Oh, omnipotent Avenue of ours!

Sole distraction for a man with no means in the capital! And how well swept its paths are and, my God, how many feet have left upon it their footsteps! As a single day unfolds, how much speedy phantasmagoria unfolds here!

Later in the day, I will offer myself as an apprentice at the print-shop to help run off notable passages from the works of fashionable revolutionaries and, having packed them into the Major’s kitbag, I will bravely post myself at street corners, where I’ll try to foist them on the passing bourgeoisie as they pass on their way home to their unawakened lives.

It is the third time I take that afternoon walk since arriving from another city. I go down the cobbled alley to Rua do Mar, passing at a distance the Granel do Clark, now with its windows open, and, seeing off Dr. Luís da Rosa after a few minutes chat at the door of Yankee House, I make my way to Pasteleiro. Coming up to Escoto’s shop, the Quinta becomes visible in the distance: firsts the araucarias and the cedars, obscuring its ceiling,

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OCCUPATION

ESSAY / JORGE CARVALHO

and then the windows of the house, turned orange and splintered by the sun that’s setting in the direction of Flores. No sign of Margarida!

The crowd breaks up. The small groups gathered at the gates to the park and other street corners rapidly disperse and their members disappear alone into the countless lanes around the Theatre and the Church. One goes for an aperitif, one to the restaurant, one goes home. In the air a faint smell of flowers lingers. All calms down. The City eats.

I also like the dark flagstones of the square that fills up at night, in the city centre, as if all the calm from the heavens had come down upon that place, to check over the sound of that cuban band; a strange thing that, a cuban band in this City, a décima here, a guateque, there, the sway of a bolero, a guajira, which is the most popular, like a madrigal from Camagüey, or a sound, a guaracha dance, until, finally, someone requests a marrabenta, and then, like a cheer, everyone rises from their esplanade chairs to dance.

I pay and leave. I look for a taxi. No, not a taxi, it‘s enclosed, better to walk. I want to get home. I want to rest. I need to get home.

I rented an apartment in the top half of a twostorey house, high up on one of the many classically named but romantically contoured residential streets, that corkscrew their way up and around the verdant hills of the City. The rent is low, by local standards, because the house stands on what is called the Sliding Zone. And, as Melanie Byrd reminds us, there is no truly safe place to live in the City, whose unique and picturesque landscape is the product of a huge geological fault running through the entire State. Every morning, when I draw back the curtains in the living-room, the view fills the picture windows like a visual tour de force at the beginning of a Cinerama film.

This vast panorama is unsettled, even early in the morning, by every known form of transport – ships, yacht, cars, trucks, trains, planes, helicopters and hovercrafts – all in simultaneous motion, reminding me of the brightly illustrated cover of a Boy’s Wonder Book of Modern Transport that I received on my tenth birthday.

The city is made up of two different parts, separated by a wall; originally its neighbours were a certain number of I’s who despite keeping their own institutions, wanted, for security reasons to share with the G’s a walled enclosure. Hence the two parts separated by a wall down the middle. Time brought them together in one single political community, by mixing the barbarian’s ways with our own, as has happened in many other cases.

There is one extraordinary thing to be seen in the City in this end of Autumn: its sky is covered in birds. My terrace is a good viewing point. I only know about these birds what I have heard being said around me: they are starlings that come together in their thousands, coming from the North, in wait for their departure together to the South.

The sightings of these birds reoccur and multiply at such a rate that, so as to order them in my own memory, I need to describe them to friends. It is a subject that can never be exhausted, and when one of the friends thinks he has seen something new or needs to correct a previous impression, they feel obliged to call each other immediately. And in this way, a coming and going of telephonic messages flows, while the sky is ploughed by the volatile.

No City belongs to a single man.

With this, any book that I read, be it prose or poetry, of thought or of emotion, be it a study on the fourth dimension or a detective novel, it is, at the time I read it, the only thing that I have ever read. All of them have a supreme importance which fades away the day after. This answer is absolutely sincere. If in it there is something apparently paradoxical, that paradox is not mine: it is me.

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aNC arquitectos was founded in Porto, in 1991, by Teresa Novais and Jorge Carvalho.

Teresa Novais and Jorge Carvalho both teach at the Architecture and Arts Faculty of Lusíada University in Porto.

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Notes This text was composed through the collating and adaptation of

The image was composed by collating and transforming visions of the

descriptions of cities by Fernando Pessoa, Carta a José de Osório

city by Ambroglio Lorenzetti, Effects of good governance upon the City

Oliveira (1932); Fiódor Dostóievski, Petersburg News (1847); Paul

(1337–1340); Pieter Bruegel, Kinderspiele [Children’s Games] (1560);

Auster, Leviathan, (1992); John Le Carré, Absolute friends (2003), Nikolai

Canaletto, Piazza San Marco (1735–40); Giovanni Battista Piranese,

Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol – Petersburg Tales – Nevsky

Via Appia (1756); Ruth Eaton, The City (1913); George Grosz, Metropolis

Prospect (1834); Patrick Süskind, Perfume, The story of a Murderer

(1916–1917); Dieter Roth, Dusseldorf (1971); Joseph Beuys, 7000 Oak

(1983); Vitorino Nemésio, Mau tempo no canal (1944); Patrick Süskind,

Trees (1982); Dieter Magnus, Motor-way; Thomas Demand, Factory

The Pigeon (1987); Francisco José Viegas, Lourenço Marques (2002);

(1994); Vito Acconci, Parque no Edifício (1996); Thomas Hirschhorn,

Mário Henrique Leiria, Gin Tonic Tales (1973); David Lodge, Changing

Monument to Deleuze (2000), Hotel Democracy (2003); Lars Ramberg,

Places (1975); Strabo, The Geography (c. 7 BC); Italo Calvino, Palomar,

Doubt (2005); Banksy, Flower (2007); Exyzt, Southwark Lido (2008).

(1983); Sofocle, Antigona (sec. V BC).

OCCUPATION

THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5

Inside Outside

Tutors Sheila O’Donnell Jennifer O’Leary Students Claire Chawke Edin Gicevic Ronan Kenny Caroline Kiernan Niamh Murphy Enda Naughton

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Interlocking spaces Ronan Kenny

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This studio explored the relationship between inside and outside in its widest sense, both physical and social. There are many old and new urban structures where the distinction between internal and external spaces is postponed or extended. This can be achieved by the use of porticos, canopies, level changes, screens, changes in surface materials, set-backs, over-hangs etc.

Some buildings make people feel excluded by the nature of their enclosure and boundaries.

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The group chose to develop ideas around this theme through the design of school buildings. Their work has built on research on schools carried out last year.

We were interested in how ambiguities between inside and outside can enhance the progression from public to private space in an urban school.

These in-between spaces provide intriguing social and architectural possibilities. They can also be used to celebrate and manipulate weather and light.

Contingent spaces that exist in the in-between, where a child can pause without committing to entering or leaving, enrich the experience of the building. Covered outside spaces increase the useable area and intensify the experience of use. A roof can provide a new ground plane; a place to play or work.

We started by asking the students to identify, visit and study buildings in the city which embodied these characteristics. They then made a detailed

study of the 19th century Classical courthouse in Dundalk. This was presented through a series of drawings which recorded and interpreted the elaborate transitional spaces between forecourt and courtroom; an extended threshold composed of a series of external and internal public rooms.

Throughout the semester precedent studies of school buildings were made within agreed parameters. All schools studied were assessed under Department of Education design guidelines.

The group research work has been collated into a single document.

Each student selected a site in the city of Dublin.

Through their design projects they have developed themes identified through research and reading, and have questioned and adjusted the standard brief for a school.

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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5

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(above) Classroom model Niamh Murphy

(opposite) Ground floor plan and section Enda Naughton

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THESIS RESEARCH GROUP / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 5

(left) 1:500 site model interim stage Claire Chawke

(below) 1:500 site model

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Caroline Kiernan

(opposite) Window threshold Edin Gicevic

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Shadow Society

EVENT / LECTURE / DAVID LEATHERBARROW

Hedging the road so It invited all comers

David Leatherbarrow

To the hush and the mush Of its whispering treadmill,

Its limits defined, So they thought, from outside. they must have been thankful For the hum of the traffic

—Seamus Heaney, from Door into the Dark

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Lucio Costa et al, Ministry of Education Photo by David Leatherbarrow

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The production of a shadow was once described as the origin of architecture. Sverre Fehn, who made this marvelous statement, felt that people are drawn together by the shade.1 Architecture, to use Seamus Heaney’s beautiful phrase, is a “door into the dark.” That architecture and community originate together has been known, or believed since remote antiquity, for architecture has always been a public art, culture’s accommodation and representation. Barriers against others and the wide horizon are often unnecessary, in fact often a hindrance, for they may block communication.

An alternative form of place definition is a roof or canopy, some element that breaks into the sky’s wide continuity and thereby casts an atmospheric but legible limit to an enclosure. My opening point is this: the modulation of light and temperature at architectural edges has social significance. The aim of this short talk is to elaborate the occupational, practical, even institutional meanings of shady spots in the urban landscape. A study longer than this one would be required to show that this topic has given rise to a wide range of approaches in modern architecture.

In the great works of early modernism shadows often disappeared because buildings were designed to admit more and more light. Obvious examples include Duiker’s Open Air School, Le Corbusier’s Cité de Refuge, and Gropius’ Bauhaus building. The (moral) dedication to health and hygiene explains the desire for ever more light only partly, the (aesthetic) “play of masses in the light” was no less a concern. After the 1930s more nuanced solutions started to appear. These involved the interplay of shadow and light, their gradation and intensity, and the recognition of their cultural associations.

The renewed interest in the capacities of building materials – their ability to absorb or reflect light, for example – also signals changing attitudes toward shadows. This recent development was anticipated by the later work of Le Corbusier, of course, also the buildings by Marcel Breuer, Oscar Niemeyer, and Carlos Villanueva in the inter- and post-war years, as well as that of the well-known shadow-casters

of more recent times, I mean figures like Louis Kahn, Tadao Ando, Jean Nouvel, and Paulo Mendes de Rocha. Yet, in the buildings of these architects the effects of shadows are not important for their own sake. The problem is not essentially aesthetic.

Shadows are sought because they shelter social space. Whether or not one agrees with Fehn about their role in architectural origins, I think it is fair to say that modern architects were not the first to see the cultural function of dwelling in the dark. Given its long history, there may be something of more than passing interest here.

Shadow casting has been said to give rise to the art of painting. According to Pliny the Elder, the dark profile of a Corinthian maid’s departing lover prompted the production of a mnemonic trace, a shadow’s outline that served as a slight but significant vestige of someone soon to be gone.2 That shadows indicate loss is equally clear from the definition offered by the art historian Michael Baxandall: a shadow is a local and relative deficiency in the quantity of light meeting a surface.

Although not an object, a shadow is not nothing.3 The word adumbration catches its double sense quite precisely: it means both outline and shade, something that alternately foreshadows and overshadows, an outline that envelops. In colloquial usage, the privation to which Baxandall referred is variously rendered with synonyms for lack: shadowy or dark means unclear, impalpable, and unreal – lacking in substance. This substitutes the sense of deficiency for desire. Yet, when the full force of the ambient environment is considered, the larger lack one would expect as its corollary is not accompanied by more privation, just the reverse;

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2

Plinythe Elder, Natural History, chapter 35, Loeb Classical Library, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, 1949), p. 151. A summary of the long history of illustrating and interpreting Pliny’s tale can be found in Robert Rosenblum, “The Origin of Painting: A Problem in the Iconography of Romantic Classicism, The Art Bulletin, vol. 39, no. 4 (December, 1957) pp. 279–290

3

Michael Baxandall, Shadows and Enlightenment (New Haven, 1995), 2. A shorter but comprehensive compliment to Baxandall’s study is E.H. Gombrich, Shadows: the depiction of cast shadows

1

Sverre Fehn, with Per Olaf Fjeld, “Has a Doll Life?” Perspecta 24

in western art (New Haven, 1995). More lyrical, but still useful is

(New Haven, 1988) pp. 40–50

Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows (New Haven, 1977).

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EVENT / LECTURE / DAVID LEATHERBARROW

for with the production of shadowed settings in the wider landscape, especially in urban territories, there is not only a decrease of brightness but a reduction of heat, which is to say an increase in cooling. This lack can be wonderfully positive.

What’s more, shadow space, as implied in Sverre Fehn’s image of architectural origins, has cultural consequences, for it can serve as the setting for entirely public modes of occupation.

Fifteen years ago, in explanation of their Damascus Gate project, Alison and Peter Smithson gave the following account of the role of shadows in the animation of Islamic streets and public spaces:

the area just behind villas in the Veneto was called ombra.5 The spatial practice intended by this term was strolling under the shade. The urban equivalent suggests an even more enjoyable practice: in the Venetian dialect the word ombra (or shadow) is used to name a glass of wine. For decades in that city wine selling in public areas was always done in the shade of buildings. A walk in the shade [andar per ombre] was at once an escape from the heat of the day and a stroll from bar to bar, which is to say, glass to glass. Just as single spots bring people together, several give orientation and organization to entire neighborhoods.

The next step, after worship and wine, is sleep.

For that situation, too, shadowed spaces are both accommodating and figurative. In praise of such spaces, the Greek architect Aris Konstantinidis once noted that in his country: “people spend most of their time under colonnades or covered verandahs, i.e., in semi-outdoor, intermediary areas.” This is evident, he said, in “the numerous open roofed areas and awnings that shelter cafés and restaurants everywhere in Greece today… [but] this brings us to another interesting point: the Greeks make a habit of sleeping out of doors. [A French traveler once observed] people are in the habit of sleeping in the streets from mid-May to late September.”

Konstantinidis agreed, adding, “this still happens in most places… most Greeks sleep out of doors, not only at night, but in the daytime as well, for a short noon nap, under a tree or awning…”6 Perhaps the most familiar settings of this kind these days are the covered areas at the water’s edge. No landscape could be more expansive, for the beach horizon includes soil, sand, and sea.

The place marked out by the shadow, however is at once vividly definite and entirely open, inviting and showing where people can gather – as if the nucleus of a village, town, or city.

But it is not only architects that testify to the practical, cultural, and symbolic sense of shaded settings. The great Argentine poet Borges, in a

In Mosques, the shadow at certain times of the day allows the worshippers to move out into the hole [a covered urban surface] and use the shadowed area as an extension of the

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main hall of scholarship and worship. Among the shadows

of the columns slowly turning across the Mosque’s matted

surface, the occupant can feel equally at ease sitting, studying, facing in any direction, or walking at any angle through this Islamic mat-space; for here the western classical order of

columns is wonderfully, freely, freshly used to make a quite other-motivated, other-oriented language of architecture…

This Mosque place-apart still has something of the receptivity of the grove of trees… not only through its use of classical components, but also by retaining the sense of a desert oasis such as the one described as the first place of worship of Allah used by Mohammed: a patch of ground sheltered simply by woven mats. The mosque functions in the manner of a grove, allowing the shade to come alive, the shadows to turn, the air to move; communicating a sense of quietude.4

Temperature change, then, is only the most objective quality of the shadowed space in the city. Just as forceful, if less measurable, is the receptivity of the dark spot, also its animation and, paradoxically, its quietude. All of this is communicative; places of this kind enclose and express gathering, probably because they imply but don’t overstate separation.

That the enveloping generosity of shadowed street space can be pleasurably convivial is made plain by usage in a different part of the world. Traditionally,

5

Marco Frascari, ‘A Secret Semiotic Skiagraphy’, Via 11, Architecture and Shadow (Philadelphia, 1990) pp. 48–49

4

Alison and Peter Smithson, ‘Damascus Gate Project’ Via 11, Architecture and Shadow (Philadelphia, 1990) p. 79

6

Aris Konstantinidis, Elements For Self-Knowledge (Athens, 1975), pp. 311–312

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Oscar Niemeyer, Architecture Faculty Photo by David Leatherbarrow

wonderful poem called ‘Unknown Street’ indicated some of these meanings. He began by observing that Hebrew language indicates evening with the term “the twilight of the dove.” Recounting his visit to an unfamiliar avenue, he recalled that as the walls and cornices of an ample and broadly terraced street “took on the pastel color of the sky… everything – the drab houses, the crude banisters, the doorknockers, perhaps the hopes of a girl dreaming on a balcony – entered into my vain heart with the clarity of tears.”7

7

J. L. Borges, ‘Unknown Street’, (Calle desconocida), trans. Alexander Coleman, in Selected Poems Jorge Luis Borges (New York, 1999), p. 11

OCCUPATION

EVENT / LECTURE / DAVID LEATHERBARROW

Le Corbusier, Millowners Building Photo by David Leatherbarrow

No doubt loss is at issue here, at least longing, likewise melancholy, but also a sense that these sentiments are shared in the city’s shadowed spaces. Borges’ poem called ‘Patio’ elaborated the full range of meanings of the city’s darkened (but still public) spaces. Midway through the poem he wrote: “Patio, heaven’s watercourse. The patio is the slope down which the sky flows into the house.

Serenely eternity waits at the crossway of the stars. It is lovely to live in the dark friendliness of covered entranceway, arbor, and wellhead.”8 In this last line he lists the key elements and qualities: both artificial and natural coverings, the dry sky and wet earth, and with reference to friendship, or the experience of sharing, the sense of community these conjunctions sustain. Seamus Heaney has made it plain that the pleasures of shaded social space are not special to southern settings. In ‘Known World’ he asks: “Were we not made for summer, shade and coolness/ And gazing through an open door at sunlight?/ For paradise lost?”9 Of the many lines that answer the question, the following from ‘His Reverie for Water’ resonate widely: “And then this ladder of our own that ran/ deep into a well shaft being sunk/ in[to] broad daylight, men puddling at the source.”10 It is with the sense of community – men puddling at the source – that I want to end.

Speaking broadly, but thinking of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Marcel Breuer, there are two problems with the modernist stress on sunlight, on its maximization: 1) that its increase also means more heat and glare, and 2) that the physicalism this emphasis assumes severs the reciprocity between the material condition of a situation and its cultural sense, as if the provision of the first were sufficient for the cultivation of the second. My hope is that the passages I have adduced suggest that the mixing of light and darkness at the meeting points of streets and interiors sets the stage for various enactments of public life: praying outside the mosque, drinking wine in a café, taking a midday nap. Even though the shadows that variously blanket the spaces of the city are deprived of light, they are not for that reason private. Shadowed spaces offer settings that people want to share.

Insofar as each is an index of time’s passing – at once a clock, calendar, and chronicle – the shadowed setting is also testimony to what a place has been and might yet become.

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8

J. L. Borges, ‘Patio’, (Un patio), trans. Robert Fitzgerald, in Selected Poems Jorge Luis Borges (New York, 1999), p. 15

9

Seamus Heaney, ‘Known World’, in Electric Light (New York: Farrar,

David Leatherbarrow is Professor

Straus and Giroux, 2001) p. 24

of Architecture and Chairman of

10 Seamus Heaney, ‘His Reverie for Water’, in (London: Faber and Faber, 1998) p. 422

the Graduate Group in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.

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STUDIOS / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 / SEMESTER 2

Occupations Cahir, County Tipperary

Staff Marcus Donaghy Orla Murphy Sheila O’Donnell Emmett Scanlon Students Eimear Arthur Maria Carmody Andras Dankhazi Emilie Folkersen Denis Forrest Philipp Gengenbach Lisa Halton Michael Hayes Jonathan Janssens Samuel Kane James Kennedy Zoé Laebens Donal Lally Sara Madigan Conor Maguire Philip McGlade Sarah McKendry Barbara McShane Banbha Nic Canna Jennifer O’Donnell Darren Snow Adrian Sweeney Albert Tobin

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Exchanges Photo by Philip McGlade

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Using the RIAI Travelling Scholarship theme of ‘town’, the group selected the town of Cahir and made proposals as to how one might better integrate existing recent housing developments into the physical, social and community life of the town.

The character of the Irish rural town has changed profoundly in recent years. Between the years of 2002 and 2006, the greatest rate of population change recorded in the Census was in the town category. The population of Ireland’s five cities increased by just 4.1 percent; the rural population increased by 7.5 percent.

The population of towns however, increased on average by 18.5 percent. The majority of the housing provided to accommodate these new populations was based on a suburban model, located beyond the existing town cores. Lack of connectivity to schools, workplaces and shopping necessitated a high rate of car ownership and usage. Lack of public transport continues to exacerbate this problem.

Low-density sprawl now encircles what were formerly tightly knit small urban towns. These towns had generally evolved slowly over hundreds of years, accreting very gradually to match the slow waxing and waning of rural life. The result of recent frenzied and unchecked development has been the creation of car-dependent populations remote from the culture of rural town life; higher flood occurrence due to the hard surfacing of former fields; disconnected people living disconnected lives.

The studio focused on strategic and detailed thinking about the occupation of the place, how it has developed, how it became settled, how and why it is situated in the local and surrounding landscape.

Thinking focused on everyday life, on the individuals who live in the town, on the rooms in which people live and the role of architecture in making rooms which invite occupation. Design work attempts to repair the built legacy, and suggest alternative visions for a better way of living in the Irish rural town.

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STUDIOS / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 / SEMESTER 2

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(above) Flexible housing units, Cahir Mill re-commissioned Lisa Halton

(opposite) Framed house model Darren Snow & Sam Kane

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STUDIOS / UPPER SCHOOL / YEAR 4 / SEMESTER 2

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(above) Experiencing Cahir by road, navigation Sam Kane

(opposite) Skinny house model Jennifer O’Donnell & James Kennedy

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POSITION / ORLA MURPHY

Town – research through drawing Orla Murphy

The currency of the architect is their ideas, communicated primarily through the drawing.

In his book, Composing Landscapes, Clemens Steenbergen describes the process of research by drawing. In drawing, he says, ‘the constant interplay between thinking and doing is essential.’ Thus the process of making the drawing, as well as the drawing itself, informs the questions to be framed by the next piece of work. The following drawings were made as part of a two year research project into the contemporary Irish rural town supported by the Arts Council and OPW under the 2009/11 Kevin Kieran Award. The research seeks to enquire into the inner workings of town in order to suggest ways of intervening in them. The objective is to examine and take apart in order to reveal. To reveal in order to act. To act in order to make something better. The research process consists of four stages: record, analysis, concept and application.

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The drawings map this research as applied to the issue of inhabitation of town cores, through the analysis of existing streets and their potential for re-use. In the first stage existing house typologies of a typical rural town are recorded. Next, the street is analysed in terms of their sectional relationships, formal elements and occupation.

Responding to the findings of the first two stages a diagrammatic scheme for the planning of the block is explored. The concept is then applied to an existing block condition. Vacant space is removed.

The car is accommodated in a more strategic way; pedestrian routes and a planned shared public space are inserted into the block. Dwellings which engage with the contemporary brief requirements, identified in the typological drawings, of space, storage, ground floor access, privacy and garden are inserted into the re-modelled block, remaking the street and backland conditions.

Street perspective Orla Murphy

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RE– 249 COLLECT –TION Site visit, North Great Georges Street Photo by Stephen Tierney

RECOLLECTION

ESSAY / SIMON WALKER

Apollonian Trails – Robin Walker The quest for the spiritual in architecture Simon Walker

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Introduction

Robin Walker in France, c. 1940s Image courtesy Robin Walker estate

When I was struggling with a student project, Robin was asked for help. His answer to me was “… well, you could do it like this, but in time you will develop your own attitude to architecture”. It has taken me a very long time to understand what he meant.

This is not a complete picture of Robin Walker’s work, but is rather an attempt to locate him within the context of the exhibition, ‘The Moderns’. I am not purporting to give a full and complete account of his architectural evolution nor of his legacy – but to try to introduce a picture of the particular context of Ireland in the late modern period of the 1960s and ’70s, which drove Robin and his friends to create new possibilities for ways in which Irish society could express itself, in particluar within the fields of architecture, art and design.

Robin left behind a large body of work – ranging from buildings, to paintings, to writings, to furniture and other design – which is too manyfaceted to try to synopsise here.

Those who would wish to see an affirmation of the messianic, the prescriptive and the tabula rasa for creative endeavour that has sometimes been attributed to the term ‘Modernism’, may yet be disappointed. Robin, as his partner Ronnie Tallon attests, was engaged on a search – he himself was the object of that search, the ‘responder’, the person who was looking to uncover a new definition of the environment, of Irish society and of his place in it.

I would like to discuss Robin’s idea of Structure, some of which is derived from the teaching of Mies van der Rohe, and also three buildings – the Bord Fáilte HQ, St Columba’s Science Laboratories and the PMPA HQ building.

I have chosen these three because Robin always talked about them with a sense of achievement, and I could see how much they pleased him.

They are not his best-known buildings – one has always been controversial, another is well-liked by architects, and the other is hardly known at all – neither do they resemble each other in appearance. But I hope they will shed some light on the scope of his architectural intelligence.

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Bord Fáilte HQ Building Image courtesy Robin Walker estate

Most importantly, given that the remit of DOCOMOMO is to foster the appreciation and preservation of our mid-20th century architectural heritage among the wider public, these are three actual buildings, readily visible and accessible to anyone who wants to go and see them. One does not have to be privy to the academe of architectural heritage, and it requires no more than a passing interest to see these buildings, and make the mental connection to a world of thinking and design.

Structure – Mies and the influence of his teaching In a paper entitled ‘Higher Education in Art and Architecture’ delivered in 1968 as part of an Arts Council symposium, Robin exhorted that “… we need to ensure that our buildings… and works of art fit together to express visually and intellectually a harmonious reflection of our society and its age…”

One could infer in his words a distinction between “our society” – Ireland in the 1960s, with all of its proximity to nature, strangely absent industrialisation, religious iconography and poverty of material – and “its age”, which presumably extends to a global reality. In other words, he may

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have immediately, on his return from Chicago, seen the Miesian prescription as applying to the task of inventing a local architecture.

It is clear that there were certain statements of Mies that provoked a reaction in him, and were the catalyst for a lifelong enquiry into meaning in architecture. The question is whether we can read Robin’s work as derived from Mies in the sense that it is taken to start with a diagram from Mies, and is then informed by ‘local values’ as a kind of secondary concern. I think we cannot – the work is highly original, it is predicated on a response to context, and anyway while its ideological search might derive its method from the teachings of Mies, it does not end with his philosophical insights.

That said, I believe Robin wanted to formulate, like Mies, his own position with regard to architecture, and was deeply impressed by the clarity of Mies’ thought, as evidenced in his aphorisms and other written statements.

It is clearly evident from Mies’ own writing that any discussion of his architecture does not start with appearance, nor technology, nor structure, nor form. It starts with an attitude to life and the creative process.

We should judge not so much by the results as by the creative process. For it is just this that reveals whether the form is derived from life or invented for its own sake. That is why the creative process is so essential. Life is what is decisive for us.

In all its plenitude and in its material and spiritual relations.

—Mies van der Rohe, Die Form, 1927

One thing will be decisive: the way we assert ourselves in the face of circumstance. Here the problems of the spirit begin.

The important question to ask is not ‘what’ but ‘how’. What goods we produce or what tools we use are not questions of spiritual value… For what is right and significant for any era – including the new era – is this: to give the spirit the opportunity for existence.

In its simplest form architecture is rooted in entirely functional considerations, but it can reach up through all degrees of value to the highest sphere of spiritual existence, into the realm of pure art. —Mies van der Rohe – inaugural address at Armour IT [later IIT],1938

This statement – which in fact implies that function is at the bottom of the value pyramid – is key to understanding Robin’s devotion to Mies, and his own insatiable quest for the spiritual in every aspect of his life. Mies’ three functional viewpoints – the material, the functional and the spiritual – are echoed by Robin’s ‘Seven Apollonian Trails’ – a long treatise written at the end of his life, when still he had not exhausted his search for spiritual truth in architecture.

Structure – in Robin’s definition of an enfolding concept In determining that Structure, as idea and fact, provided the basis of modern architecture, Mies saw Structure as analogous to the crystal structure at the base of all matter.

For much of his career he studied books on crystal theory.

—Prof. Kevin Harrington, architectural historian, IIT – ‘Mies, Architect as Educator’

Robin expanded on this idea in his later writings, delving into quantum physics, positing a notion of Structure as like a hadron – a composite particle made of quarks with different properties, acting in concert.

Because of his understanding of matter – “Matter is alive”, he concluded that Vitruvius’ trinity of Commodity, Firmness and Delight is “no longer adequate for a ‘vital theory’”. ‘Structure’ means an organism which weaves together the total fabric of the environment – [to paraphrase Vitruvius] Structure may be defined as Fitness, Love and Clarity – my definition of a system of order for our period.

But the word system is far too iron-like a corset for Structure – I will write of a ‘process of order’.

Robin’s idea – of Structure as an enfolding concept – supports the description of the methodology at work in Merrion Square in the 1960s, where each building was developed from basics, and style or influence was never something appliqué. Ronnie Tallon, interviewed by Shane O’Toole in the book on Scott Tallon Walker, says “Structure was very important for us in the early days of the partnership. Clarity of structure was probably the main driving force. Robin … had a very clear mind, a very analytical mind. He would go to the root of every problem and follow it through. He

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was a very good teacher and gave so much of his time to teaching. Maybe it was because he was searching for direction himself. He was a Corb man when I first met him, devoted to Corb. I often wondered why he was attracted to Chicago when he was such a Corb man. Maybe he was questioning in his own mind…”

In a quote from Robin’s ‘Seven Apollonian Trails’, he says “Having been heavily indoctrinated in the philosophy, or, if you would prefer, the notions of the modern movement in architecture, I frequently find it difficult to draw a distinction between architecture and building, and particularly good building. Mies considered architecture to be the transcendence of building. I often find it to be simply overblown building which does not engage my attention. It does not really interest me unless its roots are firmly embedded in the fertile soil of building. That fertile soil is, though, fertilised by the fallen blossoms of animate architecture. So I will try to avoid any such distinction and write instead about structure, which used by me in its organic sense, embraces architecture, building and the total environment.

Architecture is not a function of an object, it is essentially space… space and light are substantial matter and are part of construction. Light irradiates space – one of the elements supporting Structure, a magnanimous illuminated space – light, truth and love.”

In A Sense of Place, he writes in 1976: “Man’s image of place, particularly of home, seems to me instinctually and explicitly sensual and his demand to satisfy this image a normal expectation. Event and place, in memory, are inseparable and so action and environment are inseparable. It is equally true that environments designate actions.

I do not believe that one can usefully speak about the site in relation to industrialised building methods and the environment, of the site as generator of an organic environment, of the environment being in sympathy with the site or out of harmony with the site, without considering people’s understanding of what harmony and sympathy with the site means to them as individuals…”

Robin’s ideas of relation to place in the wider sense, and of an enfolding structural idea, are manifest in these three buildings.

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Site – in Robin’s explanation of ‘A Sense of Place’ It is worth remarking on the fact that architects, like Mies, of the modern period – and I am including Robin Walker in this regard – obsessively refer to notions of ‘era’, ‘age’, ‘period’ and any number of historical subdivisions and categories. Perhaps it is because their work stands in such sharp contrast to its immediately preceding context. Ironically, however, it tends to lock the reading of architecture into a linear, chronological analysis – which is partly the driver of Robin’s search – but which is confounded by the very originality and place specificity of his own best work.

Bord Fáilte

The Bord Fáilte headquarters completed in 1961 is an example of a moment when Modernism meets place-specificity, what Arthur Gibney calls ‘local values’. We are opening up a debate here in essence about the emergence of post-modernism, and in relation to Robin’s house at Bótharbuí, I have previously suggested that he may be viewed as “essentially a form of post-modernist, a radically subjective architect… who desires, above all, to rediscover an ingenuous contact with the world, and, in particular, with the country of his birth”.

The Portugese critic Nuno Grande, talking about Alvaro Siza, has said he is not a local or regional architect nor is he an international one – to use that 20th century paradigm. Rather, he is a ‘universal’ architect working with all of the history of architecture flowing through him…

Therefore, a simple reading of Bord Fáilte as a re-working of modernist language or form in an Irish context is, I think, incomplete. Patrick Lynch, in a study of the building undertaken with students at UCD, has opined that the people around Robin were all sufficiently cosmopolitan and grounded in European humanist culture, from his friends to his clients – in this case certainly true of Tim O’Driscoll – for them to see that modernism was not alien or

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foreign. His own houses, seen as a villa and a mews, situate his work in the context of the tradition of European architecture and show a deeply contextual appreciation of vernacular construction.

Bord Fáilte is, in Patrick Lynch’s view, not so much post-modern in terms of a style of architecture – it’s not ‘neo-classical’ in a cosmetic sense – but as a way of thinking about time and of the city, and of the value of the city over the built artefact. It is located at a natural node-point at the end of the Baggot Street terrace where it meets the Grand Canal, and in terms of the urban plan, fulfills the requirement for a stand-alone object or building at this point.

In Corbusier’s Five Points of Architecture published in the 1920s he includes raising the building on pilotis, by doing so he creates a doubling of the ground. In their insightful book, Groundscapes, Ilka and Andreas Ruby explain: “Le Corbusier’s ‘maison en l’air’ needs the ground only as a necessary contradiction that helps to realise the dialectic of its presence: the weaker the ground, the stronger the figure with which architecture can distinguish itself from it.

In the architecture of modernism the dematerialisation of the ground is most clearly carried out by Mies van der Rohe, but in a rather poetic way, and without the didactic propaganda with which le Corbusier postulated this achievement. True to his classicist leanings Mies generally supports his building on a podium comparable to the stylobate in a Greek temple.

In a certain sense he develops the ground… as a symbolically emphasised part of the building…

In the Barcelona Pavilion, this artificial ground is made in the form of a massive plinth that effectively creates its own ideal micro-context for the relaxed composition of walls and ceiling slabs.

In the Farnsworth House, Mies intensifies this deterritorializing effect by means of an intermediate hovering platform between the level of the site and the raised entrance platform. The weightlessness of the architecture suggested by this move eliminates all traces of the heaviness normally associated with the ground.”

In the various published descriptions of Bord Fáilte, it has been claimed that it is the first core-plan office building adopted in Britain and Ireland, and that it was the first use of fair-faced concrete in an Irish office building. And undoubtedly there are other devices also derived from Mies, in particular his buildings at IIT. But here, the treatment of the ground plane is derived from the immediate Georgian precedent, and is radically different from Mies’ understanding of a new ‘ground’. The raised ground floor and the projecting entrance steps correspond exactly to that of the Georgian house, and the basement storey, with its extended courtyard to the rear, is predicated on the Georgian basement ‘area’, which provides a quiet, private, exterior space for the building’s occupants, away from the street.

Robin often talked about how the “basement trench” surrounding the Georgian squares made the entire space of the Square ‘resonate’.

Most significantly however, Bord Fáilte acts as a cipher for us in understanding Robin’s appreciation of the Georgian vernacular. He was concerned to build at low-cost in the same spirit as the Georgian terrace – in his words, with “Fitness, Love and Clarity”. As the load-bearing front wall of the Georgian was flat and unadorned, so Robin exposed the plain load-bearing concrete frame of the modern, perfectly detailed; as the proportion of the Georgian bay was vertical and at the maximum limit of what the structural wall could allow, so Robin used the essential defining proportion of modern structure, the horizontal bay afforded by reinforced concrete; as the Georgian terrace culminated at its top in a single course of plain granite subtending the sky, so Robin set his parapet straight and flat and aligned it with the Baggot Street terrace; as the Baggot Street terrace used basic bricks made on site with local material, so Robin used the humblest of all modern, local materials – the grey stock brick.

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St Columba’s Colin Rowe’s oppositional framework in ‘Collage City’ posits a “scaffold and exhibit” relationship between existing historic fabric and modern interventions. As we have seen, Bord Fáilte addresses this question in a markedly different way to the Bank of Ireland building on the same street – instead of concealing the bulk of the building behind a linguistically sophisticated yet strangely mute facade or screen, Bord Fáilte is carefully composed according to Robin’s maxim that “construction is the basis for expression in architecture”.

In his later buildings Walker refused to accept this dominance of skin over structure, or the inversion of their mutual relationship. St Columba’s and PMPA both celebrate the qualities of steel and glass skins, but their structural expression remains clear and dominant.

St Columba’s [1968–71], a purpose-built teaching laboratory building, consists of a steel space-frame lattice truss roof, with some of the load being taken in the centre of the plan by block walls. The rest of the structural support becomes integrated in the construction of a highly original double-skin glass wall that stretches around the entire perimeter. This upper, single-storey volume sits on a lower, exposed concrete structure consisting of a small central core and a deep perimeter beam elevated on piers, which allow the undulating garden site to flow through and under the plan of the building. In Robin’s terms, Structure is made clear in the separation of the upper and lower volumes, by hanging the glass curtain out over the concrete base, while the skin, although reductive and almost opaque, intuitively and necessarily implies the existence of a cantilevering space-frame roof.

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St Columba’s Building Image courtesy Robin Walker estate

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PMPA HQ Building Image courtesy Robin Walker estate

The construction of the skin comprises an inner glass wall incorporating minimally-sized steel T-stanchions, which support the space-frame, and an outer glass wall free of structure, divided only by the slimmest mullions. The two glass walls are spaced apart at the increment of the triangulation of the trusses overhead, the outer skin therefore being suspended from the top chord of the truss, allowing plenty of space for cleaning and maintenance.

Behind the outer skin run continuous horizontal Venetian blinds, while the effect of weightlessness of the glass envelope is further enhanced from within the building by suspending glass shelves holding glass specimen jars, running continuously around the inner glazed wall. The specimen jars and scientific exhibits, while not visible from outside the building, all at once reveal the laboratory’s purpose to an interior flooded with light.

PMPA Somewhat later than the completion of St Columba’s, in 1973, Robin began work on another building among whose defining characteristics is its glass skin – the PMPA headquarters in Wolfe Tone Street.

The offices are located on the first and second floors, with a recessed ground floor originally let in shops, now converted to office use. On the roof there is a penthouse, deeply set back from the building line, with large terraces to front and rear.

By its impact on the frontage to Wolfe Tone Park, in my view the building still makes a significant contribution to the urban design debate. Part of the reason for its immediate visual appeal is the sensation of floating, of elevated space. The glass façade reflects the trees and above them the sky, seeming to extend the space of the Park.

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At the same time the recessed ground floor and penthouse levels model the building and greatly reduce its impact on the elevation of the street.

Imagine today’s developer agreeing to such a sacrifice of floor space, yet the recessed ground floor creates a covered colonnade, an inhabited extension of the pavement which greatly animates and enlivens the edge of the Park. Similarly the partially-visible, setback penthouse level, when seen from the street, suggests an inner world of the urban block, at the same time making a reciprocal gesture to the world of the street, subtly seducing the users of the Park by the intimation of an intriguing rooftop terrace with views over the city.

On closer appraisal, the sleekly-detailed curtain wall is equally subtle in its operation. Initially one admires the detail, how fine the making of the glazed panels with their impossibly slender central dividers, and the rebates that conceal their drainage. How much more resolved does it ultimately seem, imparting a reassuring kind of permanence strangely absent from today’s silicone jointed skins.

But then one appreciates the proportions of the subdivisions, vertical rectangles based on the golden section, speaking directly to their older neighbours. Behind this suspended glass curtain, the columnar structure of the building passes upward, deliberately picked out in red so as to articulate it clearly from the darkened plane of glass in front. This separation liberates the facade from the structural bay – the spacing of the columns does not correspond to that of the glazing – which is the key to minimising its impact on the street. The increment of the columns is that of the original house plots – 25ft – and, being red, they act as an ongoing visual register of this historic urban grain. While the glazing is allowed to travel past, suspended horizontally from the ground, reinforcing by its scale the plane of the block frontage. This sense of movement along the street is further enabled by the columns’ circular section, drawing people in and along, rather than pushing them to one side of a line.

Conclusion – the change in Robin’s thinking Robin spent a lot of time engaged in teaching and writing, and after his retirement from practice due to illness in 1982, the majority of his time, deeply immersed in critical writing. At the time of his writing, the certainties, what he calls the ‘direction’, of architecture up until the end of the 1960s, was lost, and much of his concern is with the debate between contextualists, conservationists and others, on one side, and modernists, on the other.

The choice of materials and techniques and their employment for functional ends should form a fountain of energy for the outpouring of the spiritual qualities and aspirations of the buildings and of the people who use and observe them – the sum of architecture.

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Progress is a myth… change is the reality. Dionysus has

just as much to do with Delphi as Apollo himself, a statement rather startling to modern ears… Apollo is the principle of simplicity, unity and purity; Dionysus of manifold change and metamorphosis.

Style is an emanation of the spirit which lies behind the appearance. I know that the C19th and early C20th were mistaken in their belief in progress – there is only change.

—Robin Walker, A Sense of Place

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Research and Innovation in the Designed Environment

A number of seminars ran in the Upper School to explore distinct subject areas of Research and Innovation in the Designed Environment.

Seminars Space Framed: Photography and the Human Habitat Coordinators: Hugh Campbell, Alice Clancy

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Collaboration Coordinator: Kevin Donovan (in partnership with NCAD)

Building Dwelling Eating Coordinator: Samantha Martin-McAuliffe

Recording and representation of Dublin Civic Museum Photo by Stephen Murray

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The Gray Cloth The Glass Architecture of Paul Scheerbart and Bruno Taut Amélie Conway

Glass is commonly associated with the presumed rationalism of modern architecture. Architectural historians directly link the great glass exhibition and botanical structures of the mid-1800s, such as the Crystal Palace Great Exhibition Building, London (1851) to modern architecture, but with this simple storyline they bypass many other major influences that were significant in the development of glass architecture. This text hopes to bring to light one such forgotten character that the modern movement, in its written history, left behind.

When forerunners of glass architecture are listed, the usual suspects named are architects who fall within the category of the International Style, from Le Corbusier to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe – but one man is often left out: Paul Scheerbart. The belief that he, author and advocate of Glasarchitektur, should also be named as a pioneer of glass architecture has fallen into oblivion. “Concise dictionaries give merely the following information: born 1863, died 1915: writer of eccentric tales and science fiction fantasies.”1 Yet the lines along which these fantasies ran is also worthy of mention.

Historically, the prime characteristic of glass in architecture has been with respect to its transmission of light. Indeed, one of Le Corbusier’s great canonical statements was that architecture is “the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light.”2 But from the time of Gothic cathedrals onwards, to structures like The Crystal Palace and modern buildings like Maison du Verre, Paris (1931) the philosophical and practical relationships of glass architecture have dominated discussions, so much so that “the argument has been made that the extensive use of glass in modern architecture has changed our culture.”3 One advocate who strongly believed in the theory that glass architecture could indeed modify our culture for the better was the Berlin Bohemian poet

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(opposite)

1

Poolbeg Lighthouse Su Wang

Ulrich Conrads, ‘Aerial pleasures at around 1920’, Daidalos, (1990) Sept.15, no. 37, p. 73

2

Michael Wigginton, Glass in Architecture, London: Phaidon, (2002), p. 70

3

Brett Littman , ‘Buildings of color, monuments of light’, GLASS: the UrbanGlass Art Quarterly, Winter 2002, no. 89, p. 43

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and novelist Paul Scheerbart. “We live for the most part in closed rooms. These form the environment from which our culture grows. Our culture is to a certain extent the product of our architecture. If we want our culture to rise to a higher level, we are obliged, for better or for worse, to change our architecture. And this only becomes possible if we take away the closed character from the rooms in which we live. We can only do that by introducing glass architecture, which lets in the light of the sun, the moon, and the stars, not merely through a few windows, but through every possible wall, which will be made entirely of glass – of coloured glass. The new environment, which we thus create, must bring us a new culture.”4 Scheerbart maintained his interest in glass architecture throughout his prolific career that included twenty-seven books and over three hundred articles. After his death in 1915, Scheerbart was reconfigured into the spiritual ‘Glaspapa’ of the Crystal Chain letters amongst Bruno Taut and other German Expressionist architects. While in close contact with Taut, the author completed three works that are important to the history of glass architecture but that remain relatively obscure: a novel, Lesabendio: Ein Asteroiden-Roman (1913); a manifesto in 111 chapters, Glasarchitektur (1914); and the novel Das Graue Tuch und zehn Prozent Weiss: Ein Damenroman (1914).5 Bruno Taut was the catalyst of the major Expressionist developments in architecture after World War I. He was actually the architect most responsible for keeping Scheerbart’s vision alive after the war. Taut, like Scheerbart, produced a

profusion of articles and books on glass architecture all of them using Scheerbartian ideas and selected quotations from his writings.

Scheerbart received some attention as a literary figure in Germany, but the short historiography of English works examining his architectural fictions begins only in 1959, with Reyner Banham’s article entitled ‘The Glass Paradise’,6 as part of his efforts to, “re-write the history of the Modern Movement,”7 as he found Giedion’s version considerably lacking.

Sigfried Giedion in his book Space, Time, and Architecture of 1941 writes off Expressionism. “The expressionist influence could not be a healthy one or perform any service for architecture… Men who were later to do grimly serious work in housing developments abandoned themselves to a romantic mysticism, dreamed of fairy castles to stand on the peak of Monte Rosa.”8 [This directed at Taut’s utopian book Alpine Architektur].

Giedion dismissed the Bauhaus early Expressionist phase and the influence Scheerbart through Taut had on Walter Gropius, saying about the Bauhaus, “the surviving ideals of the Werkbund proved its salvation: from the very beginning it set

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Reyner Banham, ‘The Glass Paradise’, The Architectural Review, 125 Feb. 1959: pp. 87–89. This article was reprinted in Reyner Banham, A Critic Writes Essays by Reyner Banham, Mary Banham, ed.

Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, (1996). Scheerbart’s work has most recently been championed

by Mechthild Rausch, who, in addition to editing and providing an afterward to Scheerbart’s The Gray Cloth, edited his letters in 70 Trillionen Weltgrüsse. Paul Scheerbart. Eine Biographie in Briefen 1889–1915 [70 Trillion World Greetings. Paul Scheerbart.

A Biography in Letters 1889–1915], Mechthild Rausch, ed. Berlin: Argon, (1991). Most of Scheerbart’s literary output appears in Paul

4

First published as Paul Scheerbart, Glasarchitektur, Berlin, Verlag

Scheerbart, Gesammelte Werke [Collected Works], Thomas Bürk,

Der Sturm, (1914), the work has been reprinted in German and

Joachim Korber, and Uli Kohnle, eds., vols. 1–10.2 Linkenheim:

translated into English in Glass Architecture by Paul Scheerbart and Alpine Architecture by Bruno Taut, edited by Dennis Sharp

5

Edition Phantasia, (1986–1996) 7

Reyner Banham, A Critic Writes Essays by Reyner Banham, Mary

and translated by James Palmes and Shirley Palmer, London,

Banham, ed. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of

November Books, (1972), Part 1, p.41

California Press, (1996), p. 37. See Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and

John A.Stuart, ‘Unweaving Narrative Fabric: Bruno Taut, Walter

Architecture; The Growth of a New Tradition, Cambridge, Harvard

Benjamin, and Paul Scheerbart’s The Gray Cloth’, Journal of Architectural Education, Blackwell Publishing, Nov 1999, Vol. 53, No. 2, p. 61

University Press, (1941) 8

Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, (1941), p. 394

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itself to unite art and industrial life and to find the keynote for a sound contemporary architecture.”9 He went on to say that Gropius, “was instinctively aware of the inadequacy of expressionism and of the need to escape from it.”10 It may be understandable that the generation of Sigfried Giedion maintained this negative stance against Expressionism. As Rosemarie Haag Bletter aptly puts it, “these historians all had come of age at a time when the fledgling International Style promised a great spiritual rebirth of architecture,”11 so they put all their faith in modernism whilst shunning all other movements. Nonetheless, once the International Style faded out, expressionism still did not receive the recognition due as World War II had created an overwhelming prejudice against anything that was German.

However, once it became obvious by the 1950s that prominent architects such as Alvaro Aalto and even Le Corbusier, had turned away from the International Style to embrace sensuous forms and expressive architecture, it was possible to take a more objective look at Expressionism. This enabled publications by Dennis Sharp and Wolfgang Pehnt to take a closer look at Expressionists Architecture and artist such as Bruno Taut – but unfortunately Scheerbart was still not considered important enough to be included. He was only mentioned briefly as an interesting footnote in relation to Taut’s Glashaus and the Crystal Chain.

At last in 1975, Banham’s call to investigate Scheerbart is taken up by Rosemarie Haag Bletter in her essay, ‘Paul Scheerbart’s Architectural Fantasies.’

In this work, Bletter introduced English-speaking audiences for the first time to Das Graue Tuch, whilst John A. Stuart’s translation of Das Graue Tuch finally brought Scheerbart to the English speaking world.

This book is the last novel he wrote and the first to

be translated into English. Yet Das Graue Tuch and Glasarchitektur are the only books to have been translated, leaving a lot still unsaid about Scheerbart.

As early as 1889, Scheerbart had shown interest in glass architecture. Glass for him was synonymous with crystal, a metaphor taken from Romantic literature, where it had symbolized the transformation of the self into a level of higher consciousness and greater self-awareness.12 As he was using the gothic cathedral as his main prototype, he viewed the stained glass windows as the main proponent of a new better society. This belief that architecture has the power to transform ordinary citizens for the better was a common attitude in the late 19th Century (the parks, gardens and exhibitions pavilions all were built with this concept in mind) but what makes Scheerbart so particular is his strong belief that coloured glass would solely be able to bring about such change.

Like Scheerbart, Taut believed that glass could alter the face of the earth. Taut was Scheerbart’s greatest and most consistent architectural apologist.

This fruitful collaboration manifested itself in Scheerbart’s 1914 book Glasarchitektur which was dedicated to Taut, and Taut’s Glashaus at the ‘Werkbund’ Exhibition of the same year was in turn dedicated to Scheerbart. It is clear from the fourteen phrases engraved by Scheerbart on the exterior of the Glashaus that it was considered a prototype for Scheerbartian glass architecture. Adolf Behne verbalised this as not, “the crazy caprice of a poet that glass architecture will bring a new culture. It is a fact!”13 For Scheerbart and Taut glass was not just a ‘modern’ material that should be used because of advancement in technology, instead it held greater significance as a material that could enable the transformation of ordinary citizens into a more enlightened society. Whilst the modern movement doctrines were based on

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9

Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, (1941), p. 394.

10 Ibid.

11 Rosemarie Haag Bletter, “Expressionism and the new objectivity”, Art Journal, Vol. 43, No. 2, Revising Modernist History: The

12 Rosemarie Haag Bletter, ‘Reviewed work: Bruno Taut 1880–1938

by Kurt Junghanns’, The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Oct., (1973), Vol. 32, No. 3, pp. 255–258 13 Glass Architecture by Paul Scheerbart and Alpine Architecture

Architecture of the 1920s and 1930s, College Art Association,

by Bruno Taut, edited by Dennis Sharp and translated by James

Summer, (1983), p. 108

Palmes and Shirley Palmer, London: November Books, (1972), p.8

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industrial progress, providing an ‘improved’ society, Scheerbart emphasised the importance of the development of the individual to achieve this better society. Nonetheless, they both emphasise the use of extensive amounts of glass as the major transforming force. Along the way however, Modernism lost the notion of colour, and therefore the significant symbolism and beauty of thought that Scheerbart had attached to glass disappeared, with it transformed to only a ‘functional’ element.

Scheerbart’s glass architecture and the Expressionist forms influenced modern architecture greatly, contrary to Giedion’s original statement.

Walter Gropius, whom Giedion admires so much for his contribution to the modern movement, was actually closely linked to Taut – indeed was one of the few members in Taut’s Crystal Chain correspondence. Gropius also took over Taut’s role of leadership over the Arbeitsrat and soon thereafter, became the director of the Bauhaus. The opening manifesto of the Bauhaus and the school’s principles were directly inspired by the Arbeitsrat and by Taut’s tracts in particular.

Banham’s ‘The Glass Paradise,’ points out some of the connections between the visionary proposals of Scheerbart and Taut and their eventual fulfilment in Mies’ and other International Style architecture.

Mies’ glass-skyscraper proposal, published in Frühlicht, the Expressionist magazine edited by Taut, contains crystalline and curving forms and the use of glass is more extensive than it had been in any previous design. He was, at least superficially, influenced by Expressionist designs.14 Though Mies’ Spartan aesthetic left no room for the extravagance of Scheerbartian’s coloured glass, his structures – and those of others responsible for modernism’s

style after the Second World War – came closer to realising Scheerbart’s vision than perhaps even the Utopian projects of Taut.15 In architectural history, critics often divide the early 20th Century between those, like Taut, who “championed the unfettered, autochthonous genius of the artist,” and those who “stressed the need for typical quality design handled by large firms with the ability to turn out the products in bulk mechanically and distribute them efficiently.”16 Architectural historians often view the work of Taut and Scheerbart as being “touched with a symbolism of rejuvenation, the poetry of a crystal-pure society.”17 They were, therefore, seen as being unrealistic and competing against a more rational interpretation of European destiny whose monument was the factory.

But in fact, Scheerbart and Taut only “sought to confront the perceived chaos, anonymity, and spiritlessness of modernity with a greater artistic, social, and philosophical unity,”18 which was the path that many of the modernist actually selected. Architects like Peter Behrens and Walter Gropius ventured on this middle path where they embraced the materials and processes of industry, whilst reaffirming the expression of culture through buildings that solemnized its central institutions.

Consequently, the portrayal of Taut’s and Scheerbart’s architecture as only being fit for fantasises does no justice to the actual impact they had on future generations of architects. To a degree, this disparity is due to the simple fact that Taut and Scheerbart died at the beginning of the 20th Century, and therefore never got the opportunity to write their own history. Unlike other architects of the period such as Gropius and Mies who were given the chance to expand upon their original works, and even

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15 Victor Margolin, ‘review of Paul Scheerbart’s The gray cloth and ten percent white, Introduced, translated and with drawings by John A. Stewart’, Journal of Design History, (2003), Vol. 16, No. 1 p. 89 16 Spiro Kostof, A History of Architecture, New York Oxford, Oxford University Press, (1995), p. 691 14 Rosemarie Haag Bletter, ‘The Interpretation of the Glass Dream-

17 Ibid. p. 690

Expressionist Architecture and the History of the Crystal Metaphor’

18 Kai K. Gutschow, ‘From object to installation in Bruno Taut’s exhibit

The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Mar. 1981, Vol.

pavilions’ in Journal of architectural education, (2006), May, Vol. 59,

40, No. 1, p. 41

no. 4, p. 64

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conform their intentions to the modernist approach, Taut and Scheerbart simply were forgotten about.

Had they been alive to have their say, we probably would now have a very different view on what the terms ‘modern architecture’ and ‘glass architecture’ signify, and what they represent to our culture.

This extract was taken from ‘The Gray Cloth – The Glass Architecture of Paul Scheerbart and Bruno Taut’, a dissertation

by Amélie Conway, which won the inaugural UCD Architecture Dissertation Award in 2010. Amélie Conway graduated from UCD Architecture in 2010.

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EVENT / LECTURE / NICHOLAS FOX-WEBER

Le Corbusier ‘A Life’ Nicholas Fox-Weber

Acclaimed biographer and cultural historian Nicholas Fox-Weber presented a lecture on the life of Le Corbusier: his training; his life and work in Paris; his relationships and ties formed with many leading cultural and political figures of the age. The vibrant, sensual and exceptionally disciplined genius revealed by Fox-Weber’s research is portrayed in the following excerpt:

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“Looking into Corbu’s life, I discovered so much that was unknown. Very few people even realise that Le Corbusier was married: to a salty, colourful, intrepid women from Monaco, Yvonne. The other woman of great importance in his life was his mother. ‘La petite maman’ as he called her, she lived to be 99, though by the time she died the press had her at 101 – Corbu seemed to have added a year so that she had a big hundredth birthday celebration. She was the person, I discovered, who had an enormous pull on him. I spent two years essentially reading the letters that he wrote her, and it was there that he revealed a lot about his persona. He was one of two brothers, his father was a watch-maker, his mother taught the piano, and he grew up in a town called La Chaux-deFonds, which he called La Chaux-de-shit. He hated it, he thought it was grim and grey, he couldn’t wait

(opposite) Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut Ronchamp by Le Corbusier, Photo by Scarlet Green, Japan

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to get out of there. It was very near the French border with Switzerland. He also didn’t like being Swiss, this was almost an obsession of his. His parents were incredibly decent, rigorous people, he remained very close to them life-long.

Corbu, as soon as he could as a young man, went off to Paris. He got away from Switzerland, he knew he wanted to study art. He began do watercolours of the view from his window, he studied art, he climbed Notre Dame, he could only afford to be in a modest garret, he hacked around… He developed an interest in women, he loved drawing women together, this was a personal obsession of his: the theme of women together, he sketched them all the time, passionately. And he developed an extraordinary friendship with a man of his father’s generation named William Ritter. And it’s in the friendship with Ritter that we also begin to understand the private Le Corbusier, Corbu as he really was. Ritter was also Swiss – from the world that Corbu considered repressed, tight, with no ability to express oneself. Ritter exemplified the life of passion, he moved to Munich, he became a devout Catholic, a passionate music critic, a novelist and openly homosexual. That Corbu developed this relationship with Ritter as is mentor is quite extraordinary, because Corbu was neither Catholic, nor musical, nor openly homosexual. But what he loved about Ritter was the life of passion, the life of engagement, nothing held back – an escape from what he considered to be the Calvinism with which he had grown up… Corbu always wanted to [live] a life of extremes.

When he was in his twenties he went off on a trip to the east… his journal of [the trip] is translated with the title of ‘Journey to the East’. He went with his friend Auguste Klipstein, it is a fantastic turning point in his life. He became obsessed with the rural architecture there. To begin with, travel was an opening point for him. His very first trip from Switzerland was to Italy: in Milan he had been floored by the Cathedral – so much so that, at age nineteen, he claimed to have spent two days on the main piazza in Milan looking at the Duomo without eating anything, without sleeping, just observing.

He couldn’t get over built space, he couldn’t get

over the power of that structure, the scale of it from the inside. Imagine, someone who had grown up in a small Swiss town, he gets to Milan, goes inside the cavernous spaces of the Cathedral, mocks the crowds with their Baedeker guides just following instructions about what to do, instead of feeling the building. He travelled all over Italy, and from then on he would go as often as he could to the countries where he thought passion prevailed. So first, that meant Italy, and then it meant this trip to the Balkans, which in turn took him to Istanbul, where there was an enormous fire. He witnessed the fire where thousands of people were killed, and basically seems to have found it terribly exciting.

He thought that the flames were fantastic to look at, he thought that a world going up in flames and therefore needing replacement gave him a source of excitement, he didn’t deny this.

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He then went to Mount Athos, the all-male island, no women are allowed there, it’s a setting of monasteries off the coast of Greece. I went there, really to follow in Corbu’s footsteps, because I felt that his days there were so important. Indeed, you see prototypes for a lot of things there that you’ll find at Ronchamp, and that you’ll find in his domestic architecture. He was fascinated there. And then he went and saw the Parthenon for the first time.

To understand Corbu, you should read about his experience of the first viewing of the Parthenon. It overwhelmed him so much at a distance, that he felt he couldn’t look at it, it was too much… He looked at the Parthenon, he backed away from it, he felt he could only approach it in conditions of moonlight.

Klipstein wanted to go with him, he couldn’t tolerate it, he had to be alone. For ten days, he explored the Parthenon. Back and forth, looking, loving, hating, admiring, thinking things were wrong, but the experience of looking and of feeling form had such a vitality, such an impact on him. And when we look at his life we realise how much of it is devoted to just to experience of feeling the space, looking at things and taking time.

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A Corbu cliché surrounds ‘a machine for living’. You know how often people will say, “Oh he’s the man who did a machine for living”, and that’s it, they’ve taken care of him with three words. He said those words ironically to someone on a street corner, when he felt under attack in a nasty conversation. He wrote a great deal about what he meant by those words, and what I discovered about Le Corbusier as I got closer and closer to him through research, was that it was the living that interested him. He was intensely human in many ways, and if he said “a machine,” it was because he gave priority to human life within. …He lived in a cluttered apartment, full of books, paintings, objects, life, food and starting in the twenties, the salty woman from Monaco, the dressmaker’s assistant, Yvonne. To live with a woman in the twenties was scandalous: he never told his parents. And she was a character – I’ve made it my self speciality to learn Yvonne’s dirty jokes, and they’re quite extraordinary, she was famous for them, she was outrageous. He was devoted to her. And he was devoted to his father, whose death deeply saddened him in the mid-twenties.

I have referred to Corbu being obsessed with death. I found a letter that he wrote a year after his father died, where he referred to his dear father in the very painful stages of stomach cancer. And then he referred to having made arrangements with the doctor for a little needle, which would bring the anguish to an end. Euthanasia was legal in Switzerland then, as it is now. This was something Corbu believed in. He saw to it that his father ended his pain, and then Corbu got in bed with is father, stayed there in bed with his father’s corpse, and sketched it, and sketched it, and sketched it. For him, the reality of death was something always of importance. He worked on his father’s tomb for a long period of time. Meanwhile, he continued his life in Paris, meeting Charlotte Perriand, the designer, working on furniture with her. He continued to design fantastic houses… he had a great love affair with Josephine Baker, who he met in South America… and then two months after getting off the ship with Josephine, he married the woman he lived with.

He was someone who took great pleasure in life.

He loved good cars, he designed a car, he loved swimming and being at the beach with Yvonne. …

He hated pretence, he loved good humour, and he was pretty childish in his ways. He was also very compassionate. When he designed the Salvation Army centre in Paris, he gave homeless people a sense of pride and dignity and beauty that no other building could have possibly given them. They weren’t made to crawl into a soup kitchen: they had a grand entrance, they had air-conditioning, they had comfort. This building is a story in itself, there were problems with it… and eventually the Nazi’s occupied the building. And after the second World War, Corbu himself, out of his own pocket, paid for its reconstruction. He could be nasty about his French clients, but to his poor clients, or religious clients, he was devoted.

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Yvonne, towards the end, was dropping down drunk every day, breaking bones and not realising it.

Meanwhile, he was designing La Tourette, infuriating his partner Iannis Xenakis for giving him no credit for the light canons. He was doing a lot, but taking credit for more, in a way that was upsetting for other architects, and yet to the monks there it was the most wonderful building. I had a monk there show me through La Tourette who had shown Le Corbusier through it, and he described Corbu the morning of the opening, measuring every space to the centimetre, checking the forms, then going into the chapel, open the door and just having tears stream down his face.

He lived for the possibilities of building.”

Nicholas Fox-Weber was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and graduated from Columbia College and Yale University. He is the director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and the author of thirteen previous books, including ‘Le Corbusier: A Life’, published by Knopf Press, 2008.

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GRADUATE WORKSHOP / SEMESTER 1

A Space for Learning: Graduate Workshop and Construction Mercy College, Coolock, County Dublin

Graduates Faela Guiden Helen Kelly Laura O’Brien

Participants Carol Rooney Nayla Abdulla Amy Blake Gillian Byrne Jade Casey Rachel Ellis Vanessa Flood Amy Fowler Kirsty Fox Siobhan Hyland Orlaith Keenan Lisa Kelly Jennifer Kennedy Naomi Keogh Siobhan Loscher Jessica Madden Danielle Maguire Aoife McGowan Helen McLoughlin Anna Nguyen Aine O’Connor Rebecca O’Hara Donal O’Mahony Christina Olwill Sarah Purcell Natasha Rickaby Gemma Ryan Beth Valente Niamh Walsh Elizabeth Warren

The project began in January 2010 with a two day workshop in which Transition Year students were asked to develop a brief for the courtyard site in the centre of their school. Through discussing the specific issues in their school, students began to design ‘a space for lunch’. The idea of a clearing in a forest was explored through models. At a scale of 1:50, students employed prescribed materials to construct and test their designs within the limits of the 9.5m × 19.8m courtyard site. Our role was restricted to photographing and cataloguing student work.

With the support of Mercy College, Dublin City Council and the Irish Architecture Foundation, we undertook to develop the student work into a built project in order to give the students a complete exposure to construction. We set about developing a full set of working drawings and a strategy for the courtyard which would reflect the students’ own ambitions for the space.

The idea of a garden and forest clearings was explicit throughout student work. We proposed to plant silver and downy birch trees and build two timber roof structures amongst the trees. The roof structures would provide shelter and gathering spaces in the courtyard. It was important that students were involved in all stages of the design process. Students also took part in a second workshop on site during the summer with three landscape architects from Dublin City Council.

Grasses, wild flowers and herbs were planted and students learned how to maintain their new garden.

The timber structures were constructed off-site and brought to the school for assembly. 100mm × 100mm timber lengths were halved to form wedge-shaped sections out of which frames were fabricated. Each corner of the frame is alternately supported by a 100mm × 50mm timber section which is bolted to a single column. This column is spliced onto a steel upright, which is in turn bolted onto a 1500mm × 1500mm concrete pad.

The idea of the garden has taken root in the life of the school and is testament to the engagement of the staff and students with the process from beginning to end.

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Shelters under construction Photo by Helen Kelly

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(above) Garden elevation Collective drawing

(opposite) Planting plan Collective drawing

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A Personal Architecture

The question isn’t demanding the name of a place or a country; it wants to know in detail what kind of world, what kind of set-up (agencement) we happen to be living

Philip Nolan

in, or into which we happen to have fallen. The information offered in the answer may or [may] not be practical; but, more deeply, it allows us to become familiar with, to tame, to master, the surprise which otherwise every succeeding moment is liable to produce. It’s a way of ensuring that the accidental, the hazardous, does not invade, frighten and tyrannize the imagination.

Any drawn place is both a here and an elsewhere. There is nothing else like these places; they are to be found only in drawings. (Painting is different again because painting is about absence.) Each drawn place has all the particularity and local knowledge of a here, and, at the same time, the promise of an elsewhere – for what it shows could be different, the moments of choice have been kept visible. Here embodies necessity; elsewhere offers freedom. The human condition begins when the two are face to face. And only drawing can describe how this happens in space and thus how they fit together – necessity and freedom – to house the human condition.

Perhaps: Le dessinateur comme carpenter? —John Berger ‘Lobster and Three Fishes’; Berger on Drawing; Occassional Press

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Drawing by Yves Berger, from Berger on Drawing, 2005

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My grandfather, while he had no trade or training, was an accomplished carpenter and woodworker.

My earliest memories are from the peripheries of projects large and small, my father and grandfather absorbed in the task, me a child amongst the tools and off-cuts, immersed in the sensory experience of construction. Play became work, imperceptibly and not completely. I grew up with texture and material, mass and form, precision in measure and language.

Yet well into my fourth decade I had no conscious awareness of architecture.

This changed suddenly when, in 2000, the UCD Faculty of Medicine appointed me to the steering group for the UCD Conway Institute project, and very soon after asked me to lead the programme that ultimately relocated the UCD Faculty of Medicine from Earlsfort Terrace to the new UCD Health Sciences Complex in Belfield. These two projects consumed my working life for five years, but this accidental and unexpected immersion in architecture has given me a lifelong interest which is now one of my greatest intellectual pleasures.

My thesis in this short essay is that the individual’s experience of architecture is, first, deeply personal, and second, essentially social. This assertion is based solely, entirely and unashamedly on my own experience of architecture, because, like the protagonist in Samuel Beckett’s ‘Company’, used so effectively by Professor Hugh Campbell in his inaugural lecture, it is the only experience of which I am in any way certain, and even of that I cannot be sure.

My conscious exposure to architecture began, as I have said, with sudden immersion in the process and technique, learning to read drawings in their richness and detail, trying to assemble an image of the world they represented, but just as often enjoying them as an end in themselves. The drawing became common ground between the unfamiliar world of architecture and my own familiar world of science. Architects, whether they realise it or not, treat drawings with affection, which is intriguing when one sees it for the first time, but which makes perfect sense to a scientist, because it is exactly how we treat experiments, observations, data and models. The scientist is acutely aware of how much remains unknown or uncertain, and that theories are constructed essentially to be

falsified and destroyed. The aesthetic of science lies in the space between unknowable reality and imperfect theory, in experiments and models, valued for their elegance, simplicity, economy, novelty, and explanatory power, or put another way, for their beauty. The architectural drawing, to the outsider-scientist, seems analogous, a point of clarity between the idea which inspired it but which it cannot fully capture, and the flaws and imperfections of its ultimate realisation.

Having adapted to reading the drawing, my eye and mind began to read the landscape and the built environment in a new light, seeing the previously un-noticed, establishing connections, utterly changing the experience of moving through the city and the world. Strangely, the effect was to personalise the city: beginning to understand the history and complexity of its fabric meant that individual faces and forms emerged with distinct identities from what had been an anonymous crowd. My favourite buildings remain those that slowly distinguished themselves from the background at this time, such as the former Gorevan’s store on the corner of Camden Street and Montague Street, or the former Refuge Assurance Company Building at 4 Kildare Street.

There was from the outset a much personal aspect to my explorations. I found myself drawn to detail, to material and texture. For me a building is as much a tactile as a visual experience, and the intimate scales are more exciting than the monumental. I have no doubt this relates back to my earliest experiences of materials and their transformation, with my father and grandfather, and my pleasure lies in its connection to the comfort and playfulness of these times. This, above all, leaves me in no doubt that one’s response to architecture is profoundly individual, deeply rooted in who we are and how we were formed.

It is important to give a passing mention to the architects with whom I came in contact in these years, who chose to encourage my naive interest rather than dismiss it. The first, Peter Dudley, helped in ways so important yet so small he will not remember them; later Sean O’Laoire, Ralph Bingham and colleagues involved in the Health Sciences development, and throughout, my good

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friend Denis Byrne, were sources of stimulus and reference. This stands as a reminder to architects and students of their constant role as representatives of the profession and its art, and that much of public engagement is the sum of many individual and private engagements.

Around this time a more pressing and practical matter emerged, the need to house my family with two children under five. Not willing to leave the city, and emboldened by my new knowledge and interest, we set about renovating a small cottage immediately north of Mountjoy Square. The front room of that house, an almost perfect four-metre cube, lives in my memory as one of my favourite spaces. Living in a space that you have seen designed adds new depth to your understanding of the relationship between design and living. But the real revelation, confirmed when we moved to an apartment in North Great Georges Street, was how great and how real are the richness and challenges of living in the city. A family in the city lives and is alive in a different way: not better, but different, and unfortunately not entirely satisfactory. There is the potential of a diverse and mixed-income community to foster social justice and cohesion, to find better ways to live together, but this is countered by a constant tendency to segregate ourselves into more homogeneous groupings where life can be simpler.

And to a city-dweller, this seems reinforced rather than resolved by our architecture. The way in which we have constructed spaces for ourselves, how they are divided and connected, and how they are used, all to often fails to build ownership or community.

Private spaces are often inadequate, shared spaces minimal, and public spaces poorly managed, but above all these spaces are too compartmentalised, the boundaries too tightly drawn and too opaque.

Architecture became for me not just a personal matter, but also a social one .

This year gave me two special and very particular interactions with the staff and students of UCD Architecture, both of which reinforced my sense of the social in architecture. The first was the opening of the St Mullins Heritage Centre; the second was the review in DarcSpace Gallery of Upper School work-in-progress in and around Mountjoy Square.

The St Mullins project was noteworthy in many different ways. The setting is a vivid example of how we are enveloped by our landscape, and how the interventions of one generation persist for many. The project itself was a simple and subtle intervention that simultaneously revealed the history and heritage of a building and of a community. Yet what struck me most forcefully was the deep bonds that had formed between the students and the community; that a primary outcome of the work was a personal and social transformation. The people of St Mullins individually and collectively came to know new things about the meaning and purpose of architecture. The students seemed to have learned much about the potential of architectural practice to change the lives of people and communities, in greater or smaller ways, and perhaps also had begun to appreciate the privileges and the responsibilities that come with such potential.

It was, as I said at the time, a privilege to contribute to the Mountjoy Square project review.

Having been part of that community for twenty years, what touched me was the extent to which the students engaged with the area first as a social system, and then as a system of spaces, behaving at times more like anthropologists, ethnographers or social geographers than architects or planners.

The social element to these projects was very different. While in St Mullins, the students had become temporarily embedded in the social structure of the place, finding common cause with the community by working with them, in Mountjoy Square the students’ intuitive need to contextualise projects in the social as well as the physical sense, was satisfied largely by careful observation of the people.

It is interesting that students exhibited such a strong sense of social mission and context in their work. It is characteristic of students of any profession which has a profound impact on people and their lives. It is equally true that professional formation necessarily sublimates these instincts to the discipline and protocols of practice. My concern, notwithstanding the necessity of professional constraint and distance, is that each

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of us remains alive to the personal and social impact of our work, and that we retain vocation within the definition of profession.

My argument is, that for the non-architect, the experience of architecture is deeply personal, a unique interaction between the work and the complexity of the individual consciousness, but is also a social phenomenon, the separate and individual experiences interacting in an intricate web of social relationships. The creation of a built environment that works for people and communities requires an understanding of these processes, or at least an appreciation their importance. The problem is that our attempts to understand the interaction between an individual and a work only accentuate its mysteriousness. The composer Aaron Copland has this to say about the experience of music by the non-musician: “I am thinking of the non-musician primarily, of the listener who intends to retain his amateur status. It is the thought of just such a listener that excites the composer in me. I know, or I think I know, how the professional musician will react to the music. But with the amateur it is different; one never can be sure how he will react. Nothing really tells him what he should be hearing, no treatise or chart or guide can ever sufficiently pull together the various strands of a complex piece of music – only the inrushing floodlight of one’s own imagination can do that. Recognizing the beautiful in an abstract art like music partakes somewhat of a minor miracle; each time it happens I remain slightly incredulous.” Copland (1952) There is something incredible, then, about the individual’s response to architecture, and when we strip away programme and form and detail, it is the free interplay of the senses and the imagination that defines our particular response.

While the individual experience of architecture remains mysterious, or at least at the outer limit of our explanatory power, social processes in architecture seem amenable to study and discovery.

I have heard Gerry Cahill say that to design for communities is to support communities in creating an architecture for themselves. If we would like communities to see architecture in new ways, perhaps architects need to see communities in

new ways. We should trust our instinct, as did the students approaching the St Mullins and Mountjoy Square projects, that we need to know much more about how people live and live together if we are to create a truly public architecture. The social and human sciences have much to tell us about the interplay between communities and environment, and given the pace of social and environmental change, there is some urgency in drawing on their insights. Consider as an example the following statement, not from an architect or planner, but from a geographer: “The real project of urban modernity is best defined as a set of relationships and values that encourage human and natural flourishing in urban society. These urban values are the ideals which must guide us through the trial ahead: justice (meaning equity, not just the rule of law); modesty (meaning restraint as the necessary safeguard of civilization); and solidarity (meaning the recognition and nurturing of human interdependence).“ (Gleeson, 2010).

The story (so far) of my journey through architecture reveals nothing particularly new or profound, but perhaps it can stand as a reminder of the complexity of the interaction between architecture and the individual, and the manifold complexity of the interplay between architecture and community.

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References Copland, Aaron, Music and Imagination, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., (1952), pp. 8–9 Berger, John, Berger on Drawing, Occasional Press, Cork, Ireland, (2005), p. 243 Gleeson, Brendan, Lifeboat Cities, UNSW Press, Sydney, (2010), p. 187

Dr Philip Nolan is Registrar, Deputy President and Vice-President for Academic Affairs at University College Dublin and President designate of NUI Maynooth.

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Visitors & Reviews 2010/11

VISITORS & REVIEWS / SEMESTERS 1 & 2

Kenneth Frampton Ware Professor of Architecture, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University

Looking back over the years it seems to me that the ethos of architectural culture in Dublin has always been based on

Visitors Sinead Burke Dermot Boyd Dennis Byrne Rhona Byrne Peter Carl Peter Carroll David Chipperfield Paul Clarke Tom de Paor Kathleen James-Chakraborty Nicholas Fox-Weber Martin Henchion Paul Keogh David Leatherbarrow David Lilburn Michael McGarry Niall McLaughlin Siobhán Ní Éanaigh Philip Nolan Paul Robbrecht Igea Troiani Leon Van Schaik

cultivating a particular type of sensitivity towards the nature of the environmental grain, irrespective of whether the subject in question is an urban grain or the grain of a particular landscape, or a mixture of both. It is just this tactile quality that makes the teaching of architecture at University College Dublin into a unique experience, one which is not available today elsewhere. Understated, modest, and non-spectacular and yet, at the same time, always pertinent, UCD has something to offer that the big global schools cannot match, namely, a commitment to the craft of architecture that is as critical as it is pragmatic.

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Tod Williams and Billie Tsien Architects, Louis Kahn Chair, School of Architecture, Yale University

We have reviewed the work of students at UCD over several (below) Antiphon Photo by Stephen Tierney

(following spread) David Leatherbarrow

years. It is exceptional work. The programme of study addresses architectural issues in ways that are both global and particularly Irish. There is a clear understanding of the issues and theory that inform and drive current pedagogy. Yet the work here is done with a grounded artfulness. The hand is considered a powerful tool. The heart has parity with the head.

Photo by Alice Clancy

285 David Leatherbarrow Professor of Architecture, Associate Dean, Chair Graduate Group in Architecture, University of Pennsylvania

In times such as ours, when the interests of students and teachers of architecture oscillate between focused but narrow expertise and free but often irrelevant experimentation, the existence and ambition of a School such as University College Dublin offers a welcome alternative, for a number of reasons. First, UCD’s dedication to both its home city, Dublin, and its surrounding countryside, situates its programmes at the intersection of themes that are essential in architecture today: culture and nature, modernity and tradition, the attractive promise of new technologies and the tested wisdom of craft methods. A second strength of UCD is its inclusive approach to architectural skills and their acquisition.

No choice between digital and manual methods can be made today. UCD’s serious commitment to the full range of design techniques introduces students to their several strengths and their complementarities. Lastly, UCD offers students a combination of professors and professionals that binds together studies in the theoretical and practical aspects of architecture.

No school’s graduates approximate the ideal of the “reflective practitioner” more closely than this one’s. That the teachers and students are not just serious about their work but wonderfully collegial makes the School even more special.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors would like to thank all staff and students of UCD Architecture who made suggestions, contributions and their work available for the production of this yearbook.

Special thanks is also due to all visitors and guests who have made contributions to UCD Architecture in 2010–11 and subsequently to this publication.

In particular we thank: Wendy Barrett; John Berger; Yves Berger; Elizabeth Burns; Rhona Byrne; Jorge Carvalho; David Chipperfield; Paul Clarke; Peter Cody; Sandra Conroy; Amélie Conway; Tiago Faria; Nicholas Fox-Weber; Monika Hinz; Jonathan Janssens; Sam Kane; Ronan Kenny; David Leatherbarrow; David Lilburn; Eoin McCarthy; Niall McLaughlin; Stephen Murray; Philip Nolan; Teresa Novais; Jennifer O’Donnell; James Rossa O’Hare; Michael Pike; Jim Savage; Leon van Schaik; Simon Walker; Brian Ward; and Su Wang.

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(front cover) Sketch detail David Lilburn

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20 11

EDITORS

Marcus Donaghy

Deirdre McKenna

UCD Architecture

University College Dublin Richview, Clonskeagh Dublin 14, Ireland Tel: +353 1 7162757 www.ucd.ie/architecture

UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2011 STRATEGIES FOR AN URBAN SOCIETY

(front cover) Sketch detail David Lilburn

UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2011

20 11

EDITORS

Marcus Donaghy

Deirdre McKenna

UCD Architecture

University College Dublin Richview, Clonskeagh Dublin 14, Ireland Tel: +353 1 7162757 www.ucd.ie/architecture

UCD ARCHITECTURE YEARBOOK 2011 STRATEGIES FOR AN URBAN SOCIETY